Richard Bailey
Bio
I am currently working on expanding my writing topics and exploring different areas and topics of writing. I have a personal history with a very severe form of treatment-resistant major depressive disorder.
Stories (91/593)
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The Ember and the Crown - Part 5
The false Queen's body hadn’t yet cooled when the first birdsong of dawn touched the cracked windows of the throne hall. The scent of sorcery, ozone, blood, scorched vellum, still clung to the air like a storm that refused to pass. Light broke through fractured glass high above, casting shards of gold and red across the ruined marble floor, where Elira knelt with her fingers brushing the ashes of the broken glamour sigil.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
The Ember and the Crown - Part 4
Rain traced silver rivers down the glasswork spires of Drevril’s upper court, the storm cloaking the palace in a veil of soft thunder and distant lightning. Below, within the East Gildhall, laughter spilled through stained crystal like wine from an overfilled goblet—fragrant, rich, and sharp with something spoiled beneath.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
The Ember and the Crown - Part 3
The wind howled through Arlavorn’s spire district like a beast in mourning, clawing at the bone-white towers and rattling the glasswork domes that crowned the palace rooftops. Dust lifted in swirling eddies across the marbled streets as if the city itself were trying to breathe out the corruption settling in its lungs.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
The Ember and the Crown - Part 2
Rain slashed against the lacquered eaves of the Roseward Gate as the trio passed beneath its snarling gryphon sigils, the storm offering no kindness for returning exiles or outlawed mages. Drevril’s capital, Arlavorn, breathed with veiled menace. Market stalls remained shuttered, their canvas draped like corpses. Crimson banners snapped on parapets above, but beneath them, the scent of burning ink and alchemical ash stained the wind. Something sacred had been disturbed.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
The Ember and the Crown - Part 1
The summons arrived with the quiet weight of a blade unsheathed in darkness. Wrapped in scarlet vellum and sealed with the sun-crowned crest of Drevril, the parchment exuded an unnatural warmth, like paper left too close to flame. The sigil binding it glimmered faintly with threads of memory-ink, a craftwork so precise that even Elira, standing several feet away in the shadowed inn loft, could feel the thrum of imitation power.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
Shadows Over Soravin - Part 5
The once-proud ruin, hollowed halls of learning and vaults of buried arcanum, lay under a bruised sky. Ash still curled from fissures where forgotten magic had been disturbed, and the rain that fell was thick, laced with the taint of alchemical run-off, slicking the blackened stones and whispering like dying words into the cracks. The vault was gone. Collapsed. But its echoes still throbbed in the bones of the city.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
Shadows Over Soravin - Part 4
The descent felt like stepping into the marrow of a buried god. No light guided them, only memory. Thin lines of crystalline veinwork pulsed faintly along the vault walls, casting a sickly indigo shimmer over the steps. With every touch of a boot to stone, fragmented echoes burst outward, moments frozen in time, hazy and sharp in equal measure. Vaelin saw a gloved hand dripping with someone else’s blood. Elira glimpsed a page torn from a sigil codex, set aflame before the eyes of a weeping child. And Tovik… Tovik flinched at a laugh that sounded too much like his own, coming from a voice behind a mask.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
Shadows Over Soravin - Part 3
The deeper they pressed into the ruins beneath Soravin, the more the vault abandoned all pretense of architecture. Passageways twisted like veins, breathing faint heat through the stone. Glyphwork on the walls shimmered when touched, alive, reactive, growing. The vault was no longer just a site of research. It had become a living archive of the broken, a body built on fractured oaths and stolen memories.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
Shadows Over Soravin - Part 2
Long before Soravin was a ruin, before its spires fell and its vaults fractured, it had been a convergence point, a place where the arcane and the forbidden met in secret beneath a scholarly veil. Though the Crimson Library never acknowledged the site’s existence in their public archives, the deeper researchers whispered of it: The Embervault, a subterranean experiment in anchoring fireblooded emotion to crystallized oath contracts.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
Shadows Over Soravin - Part 1
The ruins of Soravin had not breathed in decades. Wind curled through the stone bones of its shattered towers, singing through rusted arc-gates and fire-scorched walls. Beneath the silence, deep below where light could not reach, something stirred.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
Shadows in Velvet - Part 5
The night of the final masquerade came dressed in crimson silk and dying stars. Verashtel glittered under moonlight, its towers painted in the colors of influence, peacock greens, mourning purples, blood-velvet reds. Gondolas drifted over the black-glass canals, their oarsmen silent, their passengers masked and magnificent. From balconies, laughter spilled like perfume, thick with tension, too bright to be sincere.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
Shadows in Velvet - Part 4
The underground chamber beneath the House of Ambrith smelled of rose ash and old metal. Torchlight flickered off columns carved into laughing faces, hundreds of them, smiling, grimacing, leering down as if mocking every step the trio took.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
