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 (91/594)
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The Broken Word – Part 4
Elira’s voice had returned, but the power it carried was no longer hers alone. Each syllable of the Binding Tongue pulsed with a second heartbeat—Marrek’s influence embedded like a splinter beneath the skin of her magic. Her speech wavered between liberation and control, and though she stood stronger now, every invocation whispered danger.
By Richard Bailey8 months ago in Chapters
The Broken Word – Part 3
The route to the Thorned Archive’s remnants lay through the Hollowwood—a forest not mapped by any cartographer still in possession of their sanity. Trees grew in spirals, bark blackened with old warding runes, and fog clung low to the mossy ground like breath that wouldn’t leave.
By Richard Bailey9 months ago in Chapters
The Broken Word – Part 2
The mountain trail that led to the Oathkeeper’s Grave was older than memory and twice as bitter. Vaelin led the way, his boots crunching over frostbitten pine needles. The path narrowed along a steep ridge where ancient prayer flags fluttered from twisted branches—most had rotted into shreds, their sigils faded by wind and time. The forest here was silent. Not dead, but listening.
By Richard Bailey9 months ago in Chapters
The Pale Thorn Pact - Part 5
The city of Calvenholde was silent beneath a veil of mist. The frost still clung to its rooftops, and the river had not yet thawed from the long winter. Morning light filtered weakly through the clouded sky, catching on spires, chimneys, and copper-burnished watchtowers. It was a city old enough to have forgotten half its sins and rich enough to bury the rest.
By Richard Bailey9 months ago in Chapters
The Pale Thorn Pact - Part 3
The mountains opened like a wound. At the edge of the Spires, where the peaks met the sky and the wind whispered in languages long dead, a chasm tore the earth. Wide, sheer, and unnaturally clean, as though split by something ancient and precise. The locals called it The Severance—a place cursed by time-magic during the Shattering Wars, now avoided even by crows.
By Richard Bailey9 months ago in Chapters
The Pale Thorn Pact Part 2
The path narrowed until it became less a trail and more a wound in the mountainside—sharp, narrow, treacherous. Black rock jutted from the snow like jagged ribs, and the cold wasn’t just biting anymore. It pressed into the lungs, gnawed at bone. Elira pulled her scarf tighter across her face, eyes narrowed against the wind.
By Richard Bailey9 months ago in Chapters
The Pale Thorn Pact – Part 1
The wind whispered down the mountain pass like it carried secrets. Cold ones. Ones that lingered in your bones long after the snow stopped falling. Vaelin rode in silence, his dark cloak trailing behind him like a shadow unbroken by time. The trail before them twisted through a stretch of pale, frozen forest where even the trees looked afraid—limbs heavy with snow, branches bent low as though bowing beneath unseen weight.
By Richard Bailey9 months ago in Chapters
Eclipsed by Flame – Part V
The sky over Draketh Maw turned red. Not from sunset—but from the pyre that had begun to rise within the caldera. Fire-magic bled into the clouds. The Ember Concord was already in ritual, forging a living altar of souls to bring Rhaziran—god of flame and rebirth—fully into the mortal world.
By Richard Bailey9 months ago in Chapters
Eclipsed by Flame – Part IV
Ash fell like snow across the battle-ravaged plains of Redmar. The once-proud mountain city stood cracked and blackened, its stone towers scorched and hollow. Vaelin walked among the wounded, his cloak heavy with soot, boots crunching over broken weapons and scorched earth.
By Richard Bailey9 months ago in Chapters
Eclipsed by Flame – Part III
The war began with the fall of three northern cities. By the time the sun rose over Stoneveil, the gates had been reduced to slag and the rivers boiled. Survivors spoke of a man crowned in molten steel, whose breath turned flesh to fire and whose laughter echoed like a furnace collapsing.
By Richard Bailey9 months ago in Chapters
