Warning: this is the post I have been wanting to write for actual years.
TLDR: I’m serializing a ‘Magicians of Venice’ novella, ‘Immortals & Ink’, here on the blog starting next week. One chapter a week. There will also be a dedicated page, so nothing gets lost. Subscribe, and it’ll land in your inbox.
Hey Everyone,
Remember at the end of the last post when I said: “Alexis really is coming, the early chapters just need some editing before I start posting”? Well. Hello. Here we are. The man is coming. He is bringing his Turkish corsair vibes and penchant for thievery in the sake of preservation with him. And I am, as the kids say, fully unwell about it.
What’s happening?
Starting next week, I am going to be serializing Immortals & Ink — the Alexis novella, the Turkish corsair story, the tie-in I have been muttering about for what feels like forever — right here on this blog. One chapter a week. Part 1 is written and currently in the cleaning-up-the-edges stage. Part 2 is on my desk as we speak, being drafted while I gently scream every time he and Arslan (from A City of Hearts and Feathers) are on the same page together.
I’m also building a dedicated page on the site that will collect every blogged chapter as it goes live, so you don’t have to sift through the blog feed trying to figure out where you last got to. The page will be linked from the menu the second the first chapter is up, and every new chapter will be added there too.
Why this is finally happening (or: a brief recap of my long publishing tantrum)
I have always — always — meant for this story to exist as a spin-off novella connecting the Magicians of Venice and the Order of Anubis. That was the original plan. It is, in fact, why the Order of Anubis exists as a separate series in the first place. I built it out as its own thing because my old publisher would not let me write novellas, and I refused to live in a world where I couldn’t sit with Alexis and Arslan in 1204 Constantinople on the page. So I made a workaround with the idea of a whole second series. As you do.
Then I spent a not-small chunk of my life fighting to get my rights back, because certain stories are in your bones, you can’t just walk away. And now — finally, blessedly, with a slightly unhinged glint in my eye — I can build this world the way I always wanted to build it. No corporate gatekeeper deciding my back-catalog is too weird to come back to. No contract clause stopping me from writing the next part of someone’s life because it doesn’t slot into a marketing plan. Just me, the research fort, the dogs, my laptop, and eight years of notes.
It feels, frankly, pretty fucking great.
What ‘Immortals & Ink’ actually is
It’s the bridge. That is the simple version.
The slightly more interesting version is this: in The Dark Labyrinth, Alexis gives Penelope a book. It’s the kind of gift only our Alexis would give — layered, dangerous, the weight of ten thousand years pressed between two covers. Inside that book are stories. Lost tales. Fragments. Things he and the other magicians had never told anyone, things Alexis himself didn’t have the words for until after he met her. Every novella I write in this corner of the world is going to be one of those tales lifted off the page and given its full life. Immortals & Ink is just the first.
Part 1 is set in 1204 Constantinople, just before the Fourth Crusade arrives— Alexis & Arslan finding each other in the worst possible week to be in town. Part 2 (which I’m drafting around dog walks, dictation sessions, and Magician’s notebook rummaging ) is set during the 1453 fall of the city, when Alexis goes to stop Con from being a dumb ass and crosses paths with a young man called Aurelio, who will, in time, become someone you might recognize if you’ve read A City of Hearts and Feathers.
There will be more novellas after these. Each one is another tale out of Penelope’s book. I have a list. The list is long. Try and stop me bwahaha!
If you haven’t read the other books yet
You’re fine. Really. These novellas sit before the events of both series, so you can drop in here, meet Alexis and Arslan on their own terms, and circle back to the main books afterwards if the world hooks you. No spoilers, no homework, just a couple of immortals being magnificently stupid at each other in a burning city.
If you HAVE read everything — hello, you absolute beauties. You already know exactly how feral I am to write this and exactly how feral you’re going to be to read it. I’m sorry in advance for what 1204 Alexis is going to do to your week.
You want to see the cover and read a proper blurb?
Yeah okay just cos I love you….
Cara mia, you once asked me whether I had ever found any other survivors of Atlantis, and I told you that we were the last. That’s true.
But we did find other magicians…and immortals.
While his beloved Penelope dives deep into the waters around Thera, Alexis begins to write two stories about an ancient city and the friendships he found and lost there.
As the crusaders’ fleet gathers on Constantinople’s horizon, its great Library a week from destruction, Alexis sails to the city to save what he can. On the streets of Galata, he finds the unexpected: Arslan, another immortal magician, hidden in plain sight and believing he was the only one who walked the earth. Together, they race to save books and artifacts, but something else lies hidden in the city, a piece of Alexis’s lost home he has sought for centuries, and that others won’t easily surrender.
The next time Alexis journeys to Constantinople, the siege canons are bombarding her walls, and her first emperor stands atop them trying to save her. Alexis won’t lose Constantine in his suicidal quest, and in his attempt to save him, he will break their bond into pieces that won’t mend for centuries.
Every ending is a new beginning, and on the night the city falls, through smoke and blood, a wounded mercenary looks up, and Alexis feels the threads of the Morai—of Fate—coiling around them both. Knowing that he can’t let Aurelio die, Alexis sends him to Arslan, who grants him a new life and a new name in service to the Lord of the Sacred Land.
Immortals and Ink is the first of the lost tales gifted to Penelope in The Dark Labyrinth. The bridge between ‘The Magicians of Venice’ and ‘Order of Anubis,’ it is part love letter, part confession, and the story of how two immortals found each other across a falling empire, and what it took to keep a brotherhood alive across the long dark between.
(I know, right? Can you hear me giggling like a maniac?)
How to make sure you don’t miss a chapter
Subscribe to the blog. That is the whole CTA. The chapters will turn up in your inbox the moment they go live — no algorithm, no scrolling, no trying to remember which Wednesday it was. You read it at the kitchen bench with your coffee, you yell at me in the comments, perfect system.
I am, to put it mildly, too excited to sit on this any longer. I’ll see you next week with Chapter 1.
Ames x