Survival binds them. The sword divides them.
A new chapter in the Eternal Colony Universe is on the horizon.
This upcoming novelette continues the fallout of Resurgence, focusing on two men still trapped below ground as they struggle to survive what remains of the colony. The universe is growing, and this story brings you closer to the heart of the darkness beneath Stonehenge.
Possible artwork for the cover
I will probably continue tinkering with this right up until publication. Here we have Neo feeling abandoned, lost, and betrayed in the queens/Mother’s chamber. with the remnants of the Sekta colony closing in.
Working back cover blurb
After a catastrophic uprising beneath the Wiltshire countryside, where a colony of arthropods ensnared hundreds of people underground, resulting in the loss of countless innocent lives, two men remain lost beneath the earth.
Neo knows every passage of the underground world he once called home. With the death of his beloved queen, he must escape the only life he has ever known — quietly, reluctantly, and while avoiding the remnants of the Sekta colony who blame him for its collapse.
Steve never expected to escape the grip of the underground river, but somehow he survived. Armed with a Roman sword, he must navigate a labyrinth of tunnels, not knowing if each step leads him closer to, or further from, the exit. Injured, exhausted, and driven by the thought of his wife and children, Steve will do anything to reach the surface. Anything.
They have never met, but both know of the other.
Both lives have been altered by the other.
Both carry little more than the weight of everything they’ve endured.
One stolen sword binds their fates together.
As the Eternal Colony crumbles, Neo and Steve’s paths are destined to collide in a convergence of wills where only one ideology can survive.
Sneak preview
They were dead. No larvae survived. Cooked in their own nutrient cells, or scattered across the floor like beached jellyfish after a stormy night. The innocent always suffered. Neo clenched his hands into fists, squeezing until his nails dug into his palms. The inner chamber felt cold and bare, stripped of any trace that his mother had ever existed. He tightened his leather belt around his waist in an attempt to conserve body heat under his animal-pelt tabard.
The familiar touch of loneliness embraced him, and his heart cracked open, spilling into bottomless red trenches that mirrored the intermittent crimson light bleeding through the chamber. A pull, deep and merciless, urged him to invert himself and plunge into the iced pit of his own soul. Anything to numb the pain.
This was Mike’s doing; Steve’s too. Neither of them would have survived the blast. They would never have made it close enough to the Sekta queen to plant the charges. A worthless sacrifice in a futile attempt to destabilise the hive mind.
If only they had known his sister, Lyrraq, had slipped her own pheromone signature into the hive. So subtle the colony never noticed the change, she redirected their instincts and even altered the larvae, shaping the Sekta into something fiercer, something hers. He held her accountable as well, but her betrayal cut deeper. It amplified the silence enveloping him. As he ambled, searching for life, his deer‑furred boots squelched in the viscous pools of fluid which stank of burnt honey. He rubbed the red jasper pendant resting on his chest; a gift for Ellen, which she later discarded. She was no different from the others before her. Every time. Every single time he became infatuated. Not by lust, but by that hollow ache that rose whenever someone looked at him with even a hint of warmth. By the foolish spark that made him believe, just for a fleeting second, someone might love him the way his mother had. The lifeless larvae at his feet didn’t deserve this. All of Mother’s children, every last one but him, gone. He could have prevented this. He should have prevented this.
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