by Ash&Wax
(short story for the June 2026 edition of the Community Magazine Contest) Khemi is a young sorceress saved from certain death years ago by a mysterious man. Her new master quickly put her shapeshifting capabilities to good use while sharpening her natural dark art gifts through increasingly harsher training. Together, they travel the world of an antediluvian past, seeking relics and accomplishing rituals Khemi does not know the objective of. She is meant to be a recurrent antagonist and occasional reluctant ally of Soren in the later books of my main series. The two will regularly bump heads as she keeps stumbling on this stubborn young barbarian, who's making a mess of the careful schemes she devises to please her master. You can still follow this if you'd like to read a short story from time to time. I have a lot of ideas for her and might turn this into a short story collection if there is interest.
No streak history
Rank updated 14 Aug 2026, 04:15 UTC
Entry forecast updated 14 Aug 2026, 04:15 UTC
No shadow rank yet — check back after the next scoring run.
beats 92% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 4% of similar stories
Hidden gem — exposure is the bottleneck
Readers who find this story follow it at a high rate; there just aren't enough of them. In our cohort data, near-daily posting lifted the odds of reaching 25 followers from ~0% to 17% — more chapters, shoutout swaps and ads buy the eyeballs this conversion deserves.
At this conversion, the Action Rising Stars bar (≈8 new followers/day) costs about 646 views/day — the story currently gets ~2.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 5–9 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views lifetime.
