
by JGSolid
HE SURVIVED THE GREAT WAR.HARLEM MAY FINISH THE JOB. The Great War made Cyrus Ashwood a hero. The Kingdom forgot him the moment he came home. Now the battle-scarred Dark Elf lives operates a struggling detective agency in the heart of Harlem, solving the kinds of cases that never make the newspapers. Missing inheritances. Blackmail. Murder. Corruption. Husbands with too many secrets. Politicians with too much power. If the rich want justice, they hire lawyers. If the forgotten want justice, they hire Cyrus. But every case pulls him deeper into a city where dragon bankers bankroll gang wars, orc mafia bosses answer to men they've never met, nobles trade favors like currency, and the ghosts of the Great War still haunt the streets beneath the jazz. As old enemies return, unlikely allies emerge, and a conspiracy reaches from Harlem's back alleys to the highest halls of the Kingdom of America, Cyrus discovers the hardest battles aren't fought in the trenches. They're fought at home.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 4 Oct 2026, 04:28 UTC
Entry forecast updated 4 Oct 2026, 04:28 UTC
Ranking model: rs-public-oracle-state-v1
Forecast model: rs-model-entry-v1
Chart history contains only this ranking model's runs; legacy points are not spliced in.
Not enough recent follower history to estimate a shadow rank yet.
beats 13% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 4% of similar stories
Both levers trail the field
Traffic and conversion are both below comparable stories. Cadence is the first lever — stories posting near-daily reached 25 followers 17% of the time; stories posting every few days almost never did. Get the flow going, then re-check conversion.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 10–19 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views lifetime.