Novels by Emmanuel Onyilo

The courtyard was a nightmare of melting gold and shattered iron. I gripped my broadsword tight. The handle was slick with freezing rain and Aurelian blood. I deflected a heavy thrust from a Sunburst soldier. I spun and kicked the side of his armored knee. He collapsed with a sharp cry. I drove my heavy iron pommel into his golden helmet to keep him down.Below the earth, my mate was hunting.The Alpha bond was not just a mental link. It was a raw, visceral tether connecting my soul directly to his. As I fought for my life under the blinding white sky of the siege, I felt the suffocating darkness of the deep catacombs. I felt the wet stone beneath Ashren's bare feet. I felt the absolute, murderous intent rolling off him in waves."Hold the gap!" Drax bellowed from his chair. His heavy steel mace dripped with gore.I fell back into the shield wall. My lungs burned with the toxic, sulfur-infused air. I looked at Kaelen. The prince was backed against a stone pillar. He had grabbed a disc

The sky turned a blinding, suffocating white.The sound did not register as an explosion. It registered as the atmosphere tearing open. The first plasma strike from the Aurelian dreadnoughts hit the outer sea wall with the absolute force of a falling star.I sprinted up the final flight of stone stairs and burst out into the freezing air of the main courtyard. The kinetic shockwave hit me like a physical wall. It knocked me completely off my feet. I hit the cobblestones hard, tasting copper and ash as my teeth clicked together.I scrambled to my knees and looked toward the harbor.The eastern seawall had stood for a thousand years. It was built from solid volcanic rock, designed to withstand the brutal Northern winters and the battering of the dark ocean. Now, a massive section of it was simply gone.In its place was a glowing, molten crater of bubbling slag. The freezing ocean water rushed into the breach, striking the superheated rock and instantly turning into a massive, blinding c

Onyx City did not sleep. It bled into a frantic, terrifying dawn.I stood on the highest stone balcony of the palace, looking out over the frozen harbor. The storm that had plagued our return from Ironhold had finally broken. The morning sky was a brittle, cloudless blue. The air was so cold it burned my lungs with every breath.I was not looking at the sky. I was looking at the horizon line where the dark ocean met the permanent ice shelf.It was glowing.It was not the soft, natural light of the rising sun. It was a harsh, blinding ribbon of solid gold stretching across the edge of the world."They are moving fast," Kaelen said quietly.The Prince of the West stood beside me. He leaned heavily on his wooden cane. The freezing wind whipped his dark hair around his bruised face. He stared at the golden line on the horizon, his single open eye filled with a complex, agonizing mixture of absolute terror and ingrained awe."The Sunburst Elite do not march," Kaelen explained, his breath p

The drive back from Ironhold was a silent graveyard of adrenaline.Jinx drove the battered armored rover. She kept her eyes locked on the treacherous, icy road. Ashren sat in the passenger seat. I sat in the cramped back compartment with our prisoner.The Architect was bound in heavy magnetic cuffs. I had tied a strip of canvas around his mouth to keep him quiet. He did not fight. He just stared at the metal floor of the rover with his pale, calculating eyes.I leaned my head against the cold steel wall of the cabin. My entire body ached. The freezing dampness of the ocean and the toxic dust of the prison ruins were baked into my skin.Ashren reached back over the center console. He did not say a word. He just opened his massive, scarred hand.I placed my trembling fingers in his palm. His grip was a furnace of steady, vital heat. It anchored me to the present. We had survived the mirror. We had broken the bomb."We are crossing the outer perimeter," Jinx announced softly.The towerin

The red bar on the Architect's console was not just climbing. It was screaming.The digital display flashed a blinding, frantic crimson. The number read ninety-eight percent. The air in the courtyard of Ironhold was so thick with pressurized Void magic that it tasted like battery acid.I stared at the alien controls. There was no key. There was no abort sequence. The Architect had designed the machine to be a one-way ticket to the apocalypse."You cannot stop it," the Architect wheezed from the frozen mud at my feet. He clutched his cracked helmet, his voice bubbling with blood and absolute arrogance. "The glass is full, Queen Elara. The continent is dead."I looked up from the glowing screen.Fifty yards away, Ashren was losing his grip. The Alpha of the North was a titan, but the synthetic clone was a machine built to endlessly regenerate. Ashren's golden heat was blistering the clone's pale grey skin, melting the artificial flesh right off its bones. But the purple light inside the

The drive to Ironhold was a silent, bone-rattling nightmare.Ashren pushed the heavy armored rover to its absolute limits. The massive treads tore through the deep tundra snow, spitting ice and frozen mud into the dark. I sat in the passenger seat. I checked the edge of my broadsword for the fifth time.Jinx was in the gunner seat behind us. She was loading armor-piercing rounds into her rifle magazines. The metallic clack of the bullets sliding into place was the only sound over the roaring engine."We are ten miles out," Jinx reported over the comms. "Radar is picking up a massive thermal anomaly in the center of the prison ruins. It is not just a heat signature. It is a radiation bloom.""The Architect is tapping the leylines," Ashren grunted. He downshifted as the rover hit a steep, icy incline. "He is using the natural magical currents beneath the prison to amplify the blast radius."I looked out the reinforced windshield. The blizzard was thick, but the horizon was no longer bla