BRANDTONGUE

NOVEL TITLE: BRANDTONGUE --- In a world where betrayal is a physical taste, one man must devour the sins of others to remember his own. The skies are bruised. The sun is a blind, white eye. In the wound-scarred realm of Midland, people don’t dream—they have Echoes, fragments of others' trauma that replay in their sleep. Here, sin doesn’t just mark the soul—it warps the flesh. Those who commit acts of profound, intimate betrayal risk becoming Apostles: monsters shaped by their own treachery, doomed to reenact their crimes for eternity. Cassian is a hollow man. His tongue is a ruined lump of scar tissue, branded during the Feast of Coherence—an event where his closest comrades weren't just killed, but unwritten. Their trust, their memories, their love were harvested as cosmic art by the Godhand, beings of pure emotion who feed on humanity’s capacity for treachery. Now, Cassian is cursed. His branded tongue leaks memory and attracts horrors. But it also lets him taste the stories of other betrayers. To survive, he hunts Apostles, consuming their tainted memories as fuel for his own broken body. He is not a hero. He is an addict, feeding on the very poison that ruined him. Gareth, the luminous, cruel architect of the Feast, watches from the shadows. To him, Cassian is not a victim—he is a masterpiece in progress, a walking tragedy whose suffering only deepens the beauty of his grand design. Accompanied only by a Glimmer—a shard of stolen hope that weeps like a dying star—Cassian journeys across a dying land. He will walk through fortresses of psychic stillness, galleries of frozen suffering, and into the heart of the world’s oldest wound. Not for revenge. Not for redemption. But to find the reason he sold out everyone he ever loved—and to decide whether the truth is worth swallowing, or if some lies are better left to rot. --- BRANDTONGUE is a dark fantasy epic for readers who found Berserk poetic but wanted the horror more intimate, the pain more psychological, and the tragedy more irredeemable. It’s a story about the addiction to suffering, the architecture of betrayal, and the brutal truth that sometimes, remembering is worse than dying. For fans of: · The visceral, psychological horror of Clayton Snyder’s River of Thieves or Michael Fletcher’s Beyond Redemption · The tragic, character-driven ruin of Anna Smith Spark’s Empires of Dust · The cosmic, intimate dread of Gareth Hanrahan’s The Gutter Prayer · The unflinching grimness of R. Scott Bakker’s The Second Apocalypse Content Warning: Graphic body horror, psychological trauma, existential dread, intense violence, and explorations of betrayal, addiction, and moral decay. This is not a story about hope. It is a story about what happens when hope becomes the sharpest weapon.