Warden of the Glass Monsoon
By @john1208
Aris Banyu was the laughingstock of the Gunung-Besi terraces. When he inherited his grandfather's predictive Omen-Dial and warned the city of the coming Obsidian Monsoon - an apocalyptic deluge of lacerating glass-rain and choking black silt - the elite clans stripped his wealth and exiled him to the valley floor. For a year, Aris scavenged and starved to construct the Kubah, a reinforced geothermic biodome. Then, the sky shattered. Now, as the upper terraces are shredded by the razor-flood, the surviving elites are begging at Aris's airlock, offering billions for a single cup of clean water. It is the ultimate vindication, but Aris's triumph is short-lived. The storm is rapidly degrading the dome's exterior filters. Surviving requires harvesting storm-forged resin from the deadly wasteland outside. The innocent villagers who pitied Aris are too weak to survive the scavenging runs. Only the augmented, ruthless elites who tormented him have the stamina to gather the resin and keep the dome from suffocating. Will Aris doom his sanctuary by saving the righteous, or save the colony by importing the very vipers who ruined his life?
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The Flayed Dynasty
By @john1208
Mireni thought marrying into the ultra-wealthy Zevris family would finally grant her the security she craved in the freezing metropolis of Zhegoria. But her new home, the monolithic Kravak Tower, is hiding a grisly secret. To save his dying, frost-afflicted granddaughter, the Zevris patriarch secretly butchered the luxury building’s sacred Tundesh hound, turning its mystical pelt into a life-saving coat. Now, an invisible, skinless entity stalks the penthouse floors. The curse is simple: it demands its skin back, and it is slowly flaying the Zevris bloodline alive to get it. As her in-laws begin to lose their minds and their flesh in agonizing, rabid fits, Mireni refuses to be collateral damage. Instead of fleeing the locked-down smart-building, she sees an opportunity. With cold precision, she begins to quietly corral her abusive in-laws into the spirit's path. Can she perfectly orchestrate the massacre to pay the hound's blood-debt without losing her own skin?
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