HelynaL

So when the universe falls to pieces, it doesn't mean your life has to, right? That comes later. Jeane Blake, captain of the spaceship Skylark, makes her living by looting dead worlds, planets fallen prey to naturally occurring wormhole-like rifts plaguing the cosmos. She survives the only way she knows how: avoiding commitment and arguing with her dead foster father's ghost. But when her crew stumbles upon an alien device that could collapse the wormhole network and wipe out all sentient life, they catch the hungry eyes of the Union, a tyrannical empire hunting the sinister tech.As she flees the Union's brainwashed agents, Jeane is forced to take on a shady mission and gets stuck assisting the runaway monarch of a technocrat planet. Queen Maura Tholis is seeking the aid of an interstellar resistance to reclaim her war-torn world, with another trouble-magnet device as her bargaining chip: a glove that allows her to command AI systems. Jeane couldn't care less about the whole deal, but things become personal when the Union annexes the place she calls home. And it might be her fault.Reluctant to become weapons in the hands of power-hungry militants and desperate rebels, smuggler and queen join forces. But to save their homes, they must redefine themselves, work with the enemy, and face personal traumas they'd buried long ago-and only stars know which challenge might break them in the end.[Published by Story Well Publishing!]…

HelynaL

ONC 2021 Longlister! Breva, Ludmi, and Popsicle are childhood friends and, by the way, ghost-hunters . Thanks to their dead-whisperer powers, they're good at it too, but this same ability also makes them outcasts in the human world.One day, the job takes them into an abandoned country house that holds a nasty surprise. And when their own origin story catches up with them in the form of a greedy cult and a powerful storm demon, the decision is between sacrificing their lives to right a wrong they were never responsible for and offering the world on a silver plate to an insatiable supernatural being that would destroy everything they love.[Content warning for violence, blood, death, gore, body horror, general spookiness, and implied domestic violence.]…

HelynaL

Calla has no memory of her childhood except for some hazy, recurring nightmares. But she doesn't really mind. As a servant in Kiriong, the picturesque terrace-garden home to the Hennans, one of the most influential families in the radiant Kamphua Dominion, she's content to live a simple life, untouched by the troubles of the world. As long as no one finds out about the forbidden magic stirring under her skin. When the estranged first-born son of the family, Gray - a magic-user himself in servitude of the Queen - returns home while tracking a runaway mage, the secret Calla has kept to herself for so long threatens to break to the surface. And as the turbulent tides of long-forgotten magic draw the two of them together, she finds it harder and harder to deny the power inside her. But Gray knows more than what he admits. And although in the aftermath of a vile political plot targeting him, finding out what happened to Calla in those forgotten years might be their only chance to survive, that knowledge could break them both. It could break the entire world.…