THIS IS AN ADVANCED CHAPTER! I have been releasing them as single posts since I've been writing a little more sporadically over the break. I have now fixed the damaged backlog for Forge and will begin building backlog to hold in addition to posting a few bonus chaps.
Thanks all!
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Arwin and Lillia finished Rodrick’s armor before the sun had set over the Infernal Armory....
2025-08-22 14:52:37 +0000 UTC View PostThe echo of ringing metal rolled through the Infernal Armory. The Mesh might no longer have guided any of his strikes, but it didn’t even matter. The Nightiron was practically forging itself. Every strike of Arwin’s hammer just gave it the energy it needed to move.
It was fascinating. The flaring energy from Caldera’s head flashed through the room like miniature fireworks, and Arwin...
2025-08-19 16:01:45 +0000 UTC View PostNoah stared at the patches of Beyond riddling his soul for an indeterminate amount of time. That was just about all he could do. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. So much of his soul was composed of chunks of the Beyond that it was little surprise that it didn’t view him as some kind of invasive foreign body.
And if that were the case… then it wasn’t going to go ...
2025-08-19 16:00:34 +0000 UTC View PostCatch-up chapter! Current goal: 3 more chapters to repair backlog.
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“So, what was it you were going to tell me earlier?” Lillia asked as they watched rivers of black magma slither through the lines running throughout the floor of the Infernal Armory.
“Oh, right,” Arwin said, blinking and shaking his head. “Sorry. I got caught up and forgot. I think people have ...
2025-08-17 14:53:07 +0000 UTC View PostOnly 1 chap, but wanted to have a release today. Planning on another forge chapter tomorrow. Maybe another runebound as well. We shall see, but break is officially started.
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Arwin returned to the Infernal Armory with a pile of black metal chunks clutched in his arms like a chunky, malformed baby. A very heavy one. One with a lot of sharp edges and layers of dirt caking it fro...
2025-08-15 16:00:26 +0000 UTC View Post“Are you absolutely certain?” Noah asked.
“There is no such thing as absolute certainty,” the Heart replied through a crackling buzz. “This location does not have optimized facilities for analysis. The Heart Room’s core purpose is to store knowledge. However, your records were compared against all the stored knowledge of the Great Library. The chances of your runes being infec...
2025-08-15 16:00:25 +0000 UTC View PostNoah stood in stunned silence for several seconds as pieces clicked together in his head. The Beyond was the reason that nobody had been able to locate the Citadel. It was some kind of energy that completely interfered with normal magic… and that very same power was the reason the Citadel had fallen.
The Researchers had tried to harness the Beyond and had ended up corrupting thems...
2025-08-14 16:00:20 +0000 UTC View Post“What do you think?” Arwin asked, lowering the piece of chalk and stepping away from the newest revision of the diagram he’d just drawn on the wall of the Infernal Armory.
Wallace and Koyu both examined it intently for nearly a minute. Neither of them said a word. They were both lost in their own respective worlds of experience. But, finally, Wallace broke the silence.
“That...
2025-08-14 16:00:19 +0000 UTC View PostHowdy all!
Super TLDR if you don't want to read:
I'm going on kinda-break between August 16th-September 3rd (duration of this month + dragoncon). There WILL be chapters during this time. The chapters will likely not be perfectly to schedule, and I'll probably take a 1 week of the two off as a "real" break... but I'll probably somehow end up writing anyway. I will also ...
Alex’s group let themselves rest for around two hours. That was enough for their bodies to repair themselves and magic to regenerate. Derek and Alyssa both woke up toward the end of their break, and Claire wasted no time in filling them in on what had happened during the fight with Absolution.
“You’re telling me we actually won?” Alyssa asked in disbelief. “Absolution ran? Like,...
2025-08-13 16:00:23 +0000 UTC View Post“It’s time,” Noah declared, thrusting the key into the air as he craned his neck to look up the glowing blue map of the Citadel above him. “Wake up, Heart.”
It had only been a few minutes since he’d gotten out of the mirror. The very moment he’d returned to the real world, Noah had darted over to find the Devourer and had it bring him back to the Heart Room so he could final...
2025-08-13 16:00:22 +0000 UTC View PostEleven arrived at the Devil’s den just a few short minutes after Ida left. To be fair, there was a very good chance she’d been there for quite some time and had simply been waiting for the right moment to reveal herself.
The long-haired woman positioned herself in the corner of the dining room like some specter of seaweed that stared out from the shadows hungrily. Arwin nearly walked ...
2025-08-13 16:00:22 +0000 UTC View PostHowdy guys! I'm thrilled to announce that Runebound 7 is out on amazon! As always, I've come to ask anyone who has been enjoying the series to consider leaving a review or rating. You don't even have to download or buy the novel (though that helps a ton too!) Every single bit of support does genuinely help a ton and lets me keep the series going for a long time.
Check it out below!
Thane’s eyes snapped open and he drew in a sharp gasp, bolting upright like he’d been stung in the behind. Cold sweat coated his back and stuck his shirt to his back like it had been pasted on. He could feel his heart slamming in his chest with such intensity that his ribs creaked and groaned in their attempt to contain it.
The only thing around him was darkness. He sat on something c...
2025-08-12 16:14:28 +0000 UTC View PostNoah pressed his hand against the surface of the mirror. It didn’t so much as budge. There may as well have been no magic within it at all. That, of course, wasn’t the case. He could still feel the intricate imbuements running within the golden metal trimming the massive mirror.
They simply weren’t working.
“Goddamn it,” Noah said.
Prayer peered at him from the other...
2025-08-12 16:13:18 +0000 UTC View PostIda was already in Lillia’s special torture room when Arwin and Madiv made it back to the Devil’s den. Calling it a torture room really didn’t exactly feel like the most savory of things, but he still wasn’t sure what else to call it. The dark room only had a single beaten up table in it that always seemed suspiciously splattered with questionable substances — and every time they’d ...
2025-08-12 16:08:18 +0000 UTC View Post“Delivery,” Olive said, stepping over the bisected body of the lizardman to hold her bag out to the exhausted group of adventurers in the corner of the watery dungeon boss room. “Seriously, though. Why are you ordering this in the middle of a fight?”
“I — what? We didn’t… who are you?” one of the men stammered. His face was splattered with blood and his shield had been s...
2025-08-11 16:02:38 +0000 UTC View PostNoah stumbled to a stop in the same room he’d been standing in before — but it wasn’t the same room at all.
In fact, the only similarities the two rooms had at all were the walls and furniture. Where years of disuse had once taken their toll were now rows and rows of books and papers stacked high, arranged by a careful, meticulous hand.
There wasn’t a single open space on th...
2025-08-11 16:02:00 +0000 UTC View PostAlex hurried over to Claire as soon the last echoes of Absolution’s footstep had vanished from the hall. She’d fortunately fallen within a few feet of where his anchor had landed, which meant he didn’t have to use the Singularity Core to drag himself over to her.
He dropped to his knees in the widening pool of blood around her. The wound in her chest had yet to properly seal over. A...
2025-08-11 16:01:23 +0000 UTC View PostAlex could feel the Singularity Core within him. Well, that was technically nothing particularly new. He’d been aware of its presence for a short while now. But this was different. The Singularity Core sat in the very center of his being like a radioactively charged lead marble, humming with a steady stream of power.
Absolution stood on the other side of the room. The man’s eyes were ...
2025-08-10 16:00:20 +0000 UTC View Post“What is this?” Rodrick asked.
Two looked back at the other man with weary eyes. He was so tired that he could barely think straight — but he could think just enough to realize just how dense he’d been.
It should have been obvious a long time ago. The signs were all there. But he’d stubbornly ignored every single one of them. There were all sorts of reasons he could come u...
2025-08-08 16:33:01 +0000 UTC View PostLeon’s breath came in ragged, desperate gasps. His back pressed to the stone wall behind him, slick with sweat and blood, and exhaustion pulled at his fingers to coax the sword from their limp grip.
Jagged gouges and burn marks covered his armor. Many of them were old, patched up from other dungeons, but the vast majority were new — and they were racking up. The fact that his ar...
2025-08-08 16:00:22 +0000 UTC View PostNoah approached the mirror cautiously. He kept his runes at the ready, muscles tensed to burst into motion at the first sign of anything suspicious. Some would say it was paranoia. He preferred to think of it as experience.
The mirror didn’t change. It just stood there, as mirrors tended to do. But last Noah had checked, they didn’t tend to reflect things that weren’t actually there...
2025-08-08 16:00:22 +0000 UTC View PostTendrils of Riftwarped energy crackled into being around Alex’s arm. They slithered past his fingertips and wound around his wrist like a band, hissing and popping as more and more power poured out from within him.
A flash of alabaster white cut through the coiling purple and red. Then, with a loud snap, the power exploded outward. An immense weight yanked against Alex’s hand with suc...
2025-08-08 16:00:22 +0000 UTC View PostArwin beat his own estimations. It took him a grand total of several hours to create the communication devices that Lillia had requested. They actually turned out to be surprisingly simple.
There were really only two challenges within the creation. The first was a way to keep the network of items expandable. They only needed a single ‘mother’ piece that all the ‘daughter’ pieces c...
2025-08-07 16:00:17 +0000 UTC View PostThe Devourer obliged Noah. There was a very good chance that was because it just had absolutely nothing better to do with its time. If he was honest, he wasn’t entirely sure how the huge centipede was still sane.
Well, relatively sane.
It probably wasn’t worth worrying about right now. Maybe the researchers that had created the Devourer had been smart enough to realize it would ...
2025-08-07 16:00:16 +0000 UTC View PostScreaming white magic crashed down on Noah from every direction. It tore through his domain, shoving it aside like there was nothing but air, advancing like an army of relentless soldiers. The only thing that remained within its way was the comparatively tiny shimmer of chaos magic that shimmered through the air around Noah like a gossamer oil spill.
The two magics connected with a flash....
2025-08-06 16:00:23 +0000 UTC View PostAlex was still midway through letting out a slew of curses when the ring of white flame searing into his wrist blinked out of being as quickly as it had formed. He yanked his hand out from the dark lake, the lingering traces of the pain still stinging his mind.
His wrist looked exactly as it had a few moments ago. Even though he could have sworn he’d seen his flesh warping and melting u...
2025-08-06 16:00:23 +0000 UTC View PostTwo had always considered himself something of a rather empathetic individual… but he preferred to keep a certain degree of professional boundary whenever possible with everyone he worked with.
Eleven had been a bit of an exception. There was something about the way that she literally didn’t care about anything that stood in the path between her and the promised lands of a good night ...
2025-08-06 16:00:23 +0000 UTC View Post“I volunteer as tribute!” Reya proclaimed.
“No,” Arwin, Lillia, Rodrick, Madiv, Olive, Esmerelda, Kien and Anna all said at roughly the exact same time.
Had Art and Vix been present at the time, Arwin got the feeling that they probably would have added their own voices into the mix.
Thane just cleared his throat awkwardly.
“Aw,” Reya said. “Why not?”
<... 2025-08-06 16:00:22 +0000 UTC View Post