The Maid Who Smiled at the Abyss
By @john1208
Niemi wakes up in a damp servant’s cot with a kelp-wrapped package dripping onto her face. Inside are spy orders from her trusted mentor, Matron Oili - and the severed tongue of the previous maid. Niemi has transmigrated into the gothic horror game Tides of Ruskola, assigned to serve Taavet, an ostracized arcane prodigy exiled to the academy's flooded East Wing. Destined to become the Abyssal Calamity, Taavet currently spends his days conjuring lethal shadow-spikes and threatening anyone who enters his rotting domain. Knowing he slaughters those who show fear, Niemi adopts the persona of a cheerfully oblivious airhead. When Taavet summons abyssal blades at her throat, she politely uses them as drying racks for his clean shirts. She absolutely refuses to leave his side, humming through his darkest magical tantrums while secretly healing his curse-scars. Her relentless sunshine melts his fractured mind, but the result isn't romance - it’s a suffocating, feral dependency where Taavet’s magic secretly rots the boots of anyone she merely smiles at. But as Taavet stabilizes, Niemi uncovers a horrifying truth: Matron Oili is the cultist driving him insane. Can Niemi outsmart her mentor before Taavet realizes his beloved maid was originally sent to betray him?
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Spiced Broth and Slaughter
By @john1208
Sprinting across the amber-tiled rooftops of Jūrapolis to evade heavily armed inquisitors, Vakarė plummets into a lightless alley and lands squarely on the blind, bleeding assassin she was trying to avoid. In the grimdark novel The Cinder Prophecy, Vakarė is the Fake Saintess destined to betray Ignas, pushing the discarded killer into becoming a world-ending calamity. Her solution to surviving? Shamelessly bulldoze past his lethal defenses by aggressively stuffing him with piping-hot bowls of saffron stew. Told in alternating third-person perspectives, the story follows Vakarė acting like a cheeky, relentless ray of sunshine to Ignas, while coldly and systematically orchestrating the bloody downfall of both the Chantry and his former guild. Ignas, bewildered by the lavish meals, soon devolves into a fiercely loyal, strictly platonic shadow who grows terrifyingly jealous whenever anyone else receives her smiles. But their sanctuary is threatened by a devastating identity swap: Ignas is the true holy heir, and Vakarė is the shadow-born heretic. Can she butcher their enemies before the solstice, or will the Chantry burn them both?
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