The TAles of Nyr
A fantasy romance series spanning five hundred years of one world's history, the Tales of Vyr follow people navigating worlds that were not built for them - from a girl who accidentally bonded a dragon and changed the course of civilization, to a woman who walked into the most powerful room in her kingdom and refused to leave. Across centuries and kingdoms, these are stories about women taking seats they were never offered, men unlearning what they were told they were worth, and the courage it takes to want something the rules say you aren't allowed to have.
to court an enemy.
Kahlyn Vaelorn has spent eight years learning to be useful without being seen — playing the dutiful daughter, the composed courtier, the willing bride — while quietly becoming something her father never accounted for. Finrys Solveyn is the second son of a rival house, a rake by reputation and by design, who tells himself that what unfolds between them in stolen moments is strategy — a way to get close to the enemy, nothing more. Kahlyn tells herself something similar. They are both lying. What begins as a transactional arrangement built on mutual convenience and careful distance slowly becomes the one thing neither of them planned for and neither will admit — until the wedding date that has haunted Kahlyn's future since girlhood becomes a fixed point on the calendar, and the cost of pretending finally exceeds what the architecture can hold. In the wreckage of everything they refused to name, a darker truth begins to surface — the feud that has kept their houses at war was never theirs to begin with, and the house that manufactured it has been collecting on that investment for generations, with Kahlyn as the final payment.
to carry what follows.
The lie has been exposed. The conspiracy dismantled. And Kahlyn Vaelorn, who spent two years conducting a secret arrangement with her family's greatest rival while pulling at threads no one else thought to follow, has finally chosen something for herself.
Pernia does not rest easily with what she has become.
When two seats at the King's Table fall vacant, the court turns to the question of succession with the careful anxiety of an institution that has never had to consider a woman as an answer. Kahlyn has no intention of making it easy for them. With Finrys Solveyn at her side and Crown Princess Calyx of Seramis finally moving the pieces she has been positioning for years, Kahlyn steps into the most contested room in Pernia and refuses to leave.
But the fight for the table is only half the story. When Calyx brings them to Seramis, Kahlyn and Finrys encounter a world that operates by entirely different rules. What Finrys finds there will reframe everything Pernia ever told him about his own worth. And what Kahlyn witnesses will clarify exactly what she is fighting for.
to stand before dragons.
For a century the dragons have been silent, driven back beyond the mountains by a king who holds the last known dragon in a bond built on force rather than consent. Most people in the border settlements have stopped believing they're coming back.
Veyra goes to the lake inside the first ridge for the solitude. She does not go looking for dragons.
Aevyrn, young and curious and not yet in the habit of thinking before she acts, finds her anyway. Face to face with a creature no one in the settlement has seen in living memory, Veyra does the only thing that occurs to her — she wishes desperately that it could understand she means no harm.
What neither of them planned for becomes proof of something worth fighting for — and proof looks very different from the bond Sorvynox has held for a century by force. With her brother Vearyx and her rival Ryven drawn into a journey none of them chose, Veyra sets out to do what the world believes is impossible.
to follow no flag.
Mira has spent years reading people — it is, in every sense, what she does. So when a ship captain starts paying for her time and spending it entirely in conversation, she knows exactly what she is looking at. A man worth knowing.
Five years of port visits. One kiss. An invitation to leave the only life she has ever known for the open water.
What comes with it is a ship full of deserters, a quartermaster with a ruthless reputation and secrets Mira is only beginning to understand, and a spy somewhere in the crew feeding information back to Pernia. When the quartermaster brings his suspicions to Mira rather than the captain, the three of them are pulled into something neither the rules of the sea nor the rules of propriety have adequate language for.
Hadric has always been generous with what he cannot give her. Mira has always known how to take what she needs. And Ryden is more complicated than anyone on this ship has been given credit for.
The spy is watching all of them. They are running out of time to watch back.
to be basterds.
The mercenary company known as Kassyn's Basterds didn't choose their name. It was given to them by the very Guild that tried to destroy them - spat out like a verdict the night everything went wrong and Kassyn didn't come home. They kept it anyway. Seemed fitting at the time.
Operating outside the Mercenary Guild's reach in the kingdom of Vassyn, the Basterds have built a reputation on three things: they finish the job, they don't sell out their clients, and they leave a mess. Led by Kassyn's second, Vaskor, who never asked for the chair but filled it anyway, the eight-member crew takes the contracts nobody else will touch - the ones the guild won't sanction, the clients the system has failed, the problems that require someone unbothered by the rules.
They're not heroes. They're not villains. They're just very good at what they do and completely impossible to get rid of, which the Guild has been finding out for years.
To Be Basterds is a swashbuckling found-family series following The Basterds’ job by job through the kingdoms of Nyr — the chaos they cause, the contracts they keep, and the trouble they find everywhere in between.