The Imperial

🎉 Royal Road Writathon Winner! 🎉 The full censored version of The Imperial: A Maya Mystery & Occult Thriller is here — completely free. This is the Royal Road-friendly edition. The complete uncensored novel — with rawer scenes, stronger language, and unrestrained intensity — will be released very soon on Amazon KDP. Want the darker, uncensored experience right now? The first 15 uncensored chapters are already waiting for you free on my Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/pilbuenaranas/p/the-imperial-12c?r=4whgz9&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Thank you for stepping into the shadows of the Maya world. Downtown Los Angeles hides a Mayan Revival enigma that logic refuses to bury. For seventy years, the Imperial Hotel has stood boarded up behind razor wire — a decaying Jazz Age palace of marble, gold, and impossible secrets. When a badly scarred recluse takes the solitary caretaker job, he expects silence. Instead, he uncovers sealed vaults, Maya relics, and visions that defy every rational explanation. Across the city, homicide detective Grace Churchill hunts a ghost through cold evidence and procedural grind. Young Indigenous women are vanishing, only to reappear in black garbage bags — beheaded with ritual precision and staged like offerings in a perfect circle around the hotel. Every lead circles back to the Imperial. Meanwhile, elite private contractor Robert Kestrel — Native American ex-CIA operator — is paid a fortune by a faceless billionaire to surveil the same crumbling building. What he thought was a simple gig collides with a twenty-year-old cold case… and a blood covenant sealed in the Guatemalan highlands in 1952 that modern forensics cannot explain. As the caretaker restores the Imperial’s faded glory, anomalies multiply. Ancient Maya relics raise questions no science can fully dismiss. Forgotten powers test the limits of belief. And three strangers — caretaker, detective, and contractor — are forced to confront the same unsettling truth: Some buildings don’t just hold darkness. They force you to question what darkness really is. What to Expect • Slow-burn psychological mystery thriller with police-procedural investigation • Rational protagonists confronting unexplained Maya anomalies • Ambiguous occult elements that may be hallucination… or may not • Atmospheric dread, deductive reasoning, and creeping Mesoamerican ritual horror • Graphic violence and disturbing content (tagged appropriately)