Immortals and Ink

Cara mia, you once asked me whether I had ever found any other survivors of Atlantis, and I told you that we were the last. That’s true.

But we did find other magicians…and immortals.

While his beloved Penelope dives deep into the waters around Thera, Alexis begins to write two stories about an ancient city and the friendships he found and lost there.

As the crusaders’ fleet gathers on Constantinople’s horizon in 1204, its great Library a week from destruction, Alexis sails to the city to save what he can. On the streets of Galata, he finds the unexpected: Arslan, another immortal magician, hidden in plain sight and believing he was the only one who walked the earth. Together, they race to save books and artifacts, but something else lies hidden in the city: a piece of Alexis’s lost home he has sought for centuries, and that others won’t easily surrender.

The next time Alexis journeys to Constantinople in 1453, siege cannons bombard her walls, and her first emperor stands atop them, trying to save her. Alexis won’t lose Constantine in his suicidal quest, and in his attempt to save him, he will break their bond into pieces that won’t mend for centuries.

Every ending is a new beginning, and on the night the city falls, through smoke and blood, a wounded mercenary looks up, and Alexis feels the threads of ancient power coiling around them both. Knowing that he can’t let Aurelio die, Alexis sends him to Arslan, who grants him a new life and a new name in service to the Lord of the Sacred Land.

Immortals and Ink is the first of the lost tales gifted to Penelope in The Dark Labyrinth. The bridge between ‘The Magicians of Venice’ and ‘Order of Anubis,’ it is part love letter, part confession, and the story of how two immortals found each other in a falling empire, and what it took to keep a brotherhood alive across the long dark between.

Content Note: This is a 40k-word novella that contains strong language and violent content.