About the saga

Cetia-243 gleams as the empire’s heart, a world of obsidian towers, orbiting platforms, and immaculate chambers where power flows through ceremony and paperwork. At its core lies the chamber of the Board, where ancient technology fused with something like divinity to create a system that turns war into entertainment and memory into currency.

The Board is not just a strategic tool. It is alive, tracing every move, binding every fallen soldier into a pattern of wagers and outcomes. The Archons who command it think in grand arcs of policy and doctrine, moving regiments like pieces. The Board thinks in pain, loyalty, sacrifice, and the residue of choices.

Marro Veldran stands between them, beautiful and terrible in her prescient power, speaking with the voice of Arath-Bar, a god who has already remembered every possible ending. To the Houses, she is a holy asset. To herself, she is the one piece that understands the game wants more than victory.

Far below, on Caldereth, Major Sora Virelle claws her way through real mud and real blood as part of the Fighting 57th. She was never meant to exist, an impossible variation on the Board, a soldier whose choices should have been fixed and are somehow not. Each battle she survives sends shockwaves up the chain, rewriting the lines Arath-Bar thought were already carved in stone.

For readers of Dune, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Locked Tomb, The Veiled Core Chronicles weaves metaphysical horror with military precision, exploring a universe where divine omniscience collides with ground-level orders, and where the most dangerous weapon is the ability to remember the same event in more than one way.

“On the Board, a unit is a symbol. On Caldereth, that symbol screams when it breaks.”

This is a story about soldiers turned into pieces, gods turned into systems, and a universe that keeps asking the same question: what happens when the game starts playing itself?