Fathoms of Ruin by Cerys Nighten
Fathoms of Ruin by Cerys Nighten
English | 2026 | Sci-Fi & Fantasy
The ocean doesn’t make heroes; it builds pressure until you either shatter, or you become the abyss.
Experience a visceral, suffocating plunge into a world where survival is a transaction paid in blood and pulverized bone. You will feel the freezing brine in your lungs and taste the raw ozone of a magic system that actively mutilates its host. This isn’t a tale of a chosen one gracefully mastering her gifts. It’s a gritty, agonizing descent alongside a desperate scavenger who must tear her own humanity apart to harness the localized gravity of the ocean floor. Every ounce of power she unleashes demands a terrifying physical toll, leaving her battered, broken, and dangerously close to becoming the very monster her world fears.
Mavris is nothing more than ballast, a lowest-caste harvester bleeding herself dry just to earn a daily ration of water on a massive, dying flotilla. But when a catastrophic leviathan strike drags her into the crushing blackness of the Midnight Trench, she doesn’t drown. Instead, she binds herself to the rotting heart of a dead god buried in the deep. She returns to the surface forever altered, carrying an eldritch parasite that grants her the apocalyptic ability to manipulate localized atmospheric pressure. It’s a broken, glitching power that shatters her own bones and hemorrhages her blood vessels every time she opens the biological valve.
Her impossible survival couldn’t have come at a worse time. A fanatical cult is actively wiring the flotilla’s vital buoyancy drives with volatile geothermal charges, intending to sink four million souls into the crushing dark. To stop them, Mavris must weaponize her new, terrifying biology and fight her way through an army of mutated zealots. But there is a horrifying catch to her newfound strength. Her parasitic magic is a beacon. Every time she unleashes the gravity of the trench to crush her enemies, she rings a dinner bell for the colossal apex predator lurking miles below. To save her sinking city, she must unleash the abyss—even if it guarantees the mother of all leviathans will rise to devour them all.
