Rune Wystan - Eighty Four Seconds

Name: Rune Wystan - Eighty Four Seconds
Author: Aims

This story contains themes of: child abuse, depression, extreme violence gore, stalker, torture, violent death, explicit imagery, exploitation

Story Notes

This is not a redemption story. Not yet.

Book One of The Varethkol Registeries is the part before that — the part where two people who have never been good at being human find each other in the worst possible context, for the worst possible reasons, and cannot quite manage to look away.

It will not be comfortable. It is not meant to be.

Summary

Some wounds don't bleed. They just quietly reorganize everything around them until the person carrying them has forgotten what they looked like before. Aldren Voss is the empire's most precise instrument. He finds things. He extracts things. He resolves problems the Korrven cannot be seen resolving, and he does it without a name, without a face, without anything that could be traced back to a man who stopped existing the night his world ended and something far more useful was built in his place. Sera Vael has never wanted for anything she didn't eventually get. When she notices the one man in Varethkol who looks straight through her, she tells herself it's curiosity. When she engineers reasons to stay in his orbit, she tells herself it's strategy. When she finds herself doing things she cannot explain to herself, she stops asking. Neither of them is a good person. Neither of them is pretending to be. But somewhere between a political conspiracy that keeps pointing at the wrong man and a secret that should have been spoken months before it wasn't, something begins to unspool that neither of them knows how to stop. Rune Wystan — Eighty Four Seconds is a story about what gets built over damage, and what happens when the foundation finally gets found.