by BrightRiver
This is a long story, with the following highlights. The main character is fat, physically different, and not conventionally handsome, nor cool, brooding, or aloof. He observes carefully and moves one deliberate step at a time, developing from the bottom up. Expansive worldbuilding, an internally consistent unconventional power system, revealed gradually. No cheap power-ups. Combat sequences with combos and tactical exchanges, each scene thought through. Supporting characters and villains are intelligent and layered, each a different life. Good not purely white, bad not purely black, no one entirely their own master. Sink in, you won't regret it. Two volumes complete, payoff builds slowly. Aren is fifteen, living in Redfall, a mining village in the middle of the desert. He cannot go down into the mine because his belly fills the passage. His grandfather sells the low-grade sealstones he digs to trade convoys, twenty coins a piece, enough to feed two mouths. The sealstones travel east, to towns and cities Aren has never seen, where people do things ordinary people cannot. They use sealstones the way lamps use oil; when the oil runs dry, the flame goes out. But no one has ever eaten a sealstone. Aren has been eating sealstones since he was ten. Nobody knows. He doesn't know why he can or what it means. When a village guardsman disappears on night patrol and his remains are brought back wrapped in a mat, Aren decides it is time to leave. The trade convoy heads east once a week; the next one departs tomorrow morning. Genre: dark fantasy, slow burn. Book 2 complete, outline to Book 7, won't drop. Updates: 1–2 chapters/day.
