Yoorae is after the infamous Pirate Prince, whose plan is to destroy her homeland. But he's a powerful user of dark magic, and to defeat him, Yoorae needs to know two things: a type of magic which could get her killed, and his true name.  All she has to go on are the terrified stutters of people who have survived encounters with his crew, and a simple moniker – Chen.

The Name-Seeker

(Full descriptions and links below)

Han Seoyeon is convinced that the stories Captain Park Chanyeol and the other soldiers in the fort tell her are all urban legends, but then she finds herself stranded in the Borderlands with the nightmares coming to life around her.

Borderlander

I wouldn't normally do this, but apparently the New Author Stories notifications aren't working (or, at least, don't work when you have something saved on draft before publishing it), and I didn't want you guys to miss out, so I'd like to introduce a new Chen fic, a new Chanyeol fic, a Lay fic I've had up for about a year which some of you might not be aware of (because I'm pretty sure I drafted that before posting it), and to give you a heads-up about an upcoming Suho fic which may equally not get a notification because I currently have that on draft.  (I also don't like taking up story link space, so in a few days I'll put this on private, but I may well use this space in the long term (if I get time!) to write a Kai fic as I'm not sure Blood Bound properly counts towards my one-fic-for-each-member count as it's part of the TBBC franchise and doesn't have much in the way of romance.)  I am, of course, still completing my other ongoing fics (Rogue, On Ebb and Blood Bound).

Anyway, before I bore you, here are the descriptions and links:

The Name-Seeker, Chen x OC, pirate/fantasy au || Borderlander, Chanyeol x OC, military/fantasy/supernatural au || Draw Me A Date, Lay x OC, royalty au (nearly complete!) || Dead by 100, Suho x OC, wolf/supernatural/fantasy au (coming soon!)

The Name-Seeker

A quarter of a century ago, a great plague ravaged Saurellis, killing thousands of people and leaving hundreds upon hundreds of orphans.  Some have gone on to make lives for themselves; others… not so much.

Kang Yoorae is one of the former.  A rising star in the capital city of the Saurellian archipelago in her role as magistrata, she is an accomplished sigil mage and a respected enforcer of the law.  But in the face of rising dark magic from across the seas, she has also joined The Name-Seekers, a secret group dedicated to chasing down the true names of the orphans and vagabonds on their streets.  Using a person’s true name has helped her hugely in the binding spells she places on the convicted criminals to keep them out of trouble in the future.  There’s just one problem: naming magic is illegal, and even the faintest whiff of it is grounds for execution.

The Pirate Prince has made a very different life for himself, but a successful life nonetheless.  He first appeared nine years ago, one of the many pirates that scourged the shores of Saurellis and all the neighbouring and distant lands.  With the skies and the seas at his command, he’s the undisputed Lord of the Waves and clearly capable of wielding monstrously powerful dark magic.  Rumour has it he stalks the streets of the Saurellian capital on the nights of the new moon, when his power is at its height.  His aim?  The whispers in the shadowy alleyways say he wants the Lifestones, which have kept the archipelago islands above water for a thousand years.

Yoorae is determined to put an end to him and his plans for devastation, but it’s hard to know where to start.  The Pirate Prince’s ship vanishes on the zephyrs, and no one who has actually seen the Pirate Prince has lived to tell the tale.  If she wants even the faintest chance of surviving a confrontation with him, she’ll need to know his name.

All she has to go on are the terrified stutters of those unfortunate enough to cross paths with his crew, and a single moniker – Chen.

Borderlander

Note: this is a NaNoWriMo project so will be posting - with fast updates - in November as I have a month to write 50k.

Han Seoyeon's father has just been posted as Governor in the chief to the fortress of Ximo Judian, the furthermost outpost in the Borderlands. It’s a cushy job – there isn’t really any real administration to do there, let alone military operation – and it’s one of several jobs which are prestige on paper only: it’s a stepping stone into getting a senior position in the country’s ruling administration. Seoyeon’s father is determined to excel, though, which also means shaving down the running costs. The soldiers patrol the Borderlands, but there isn’t really that much to patrol. The Borderlands are uninhabited scrub and waste, occasional ghost fires burning from the war three generations ago, but the threat is long-since gone. Ximo doesn’t need a garrison of a hundred soldiers. It probably doesn’t even need ten.

Seoyeon has barely been there a day before she can’t wait to be shot of the place. She’s willing to tolerate it because her father will have a good job at the end, and that means she’ll be able to enter into high society in the capital, which she’s wanted all her life. But a year in Ximo genuinely seems like purgatory – especially when the soldiers there are hostile to her father’s benign wishes and when one of the young ones, promoted shortly before they arrived there, insists there’s Something Out There.

Really, Seoyeon wishes she could punch Captain Park Chanyeol in the face, but with his combat training it likely wouldn’t even hurt him and he’d just laugh at her. And one of the maids says she’s seen him cupping flames in his bare hands, so picking a fight is probably a bad idea. She doesn’t know if she wants to get to the bottom of his mysterious ways, because he definitely does some odd things, or if it’s going to be a better idea to try to sweet talk her father into kicking Park Chanyeol out. Captain Park would be the cheapest officer of reasonable rank to leave in Ximo with the Governor’s intended cuts, and for some godforsaken reason, her father actually likes him.

Convinced that the soldiers’ wild stories of the Borderlands are just that – stories (it’s not like anybody’s produced evidence to back them up) – Seoyeon frequently ventures out for some solitude away from the suffocating stone walls of Ximo… only to discover that Captain Park’s warnings aren’t hollow, and that she’s lost herself in a nightmare.

Draw Me a Date

Im Yeonhee loves her country.  She really does.  But some people in it are kind of a waste of space, and there are problems and divisions in Taderra that run a bit too deep to fix.

Part-time artist, full-time separationist republican, and current university student, Yeonhee has some solutions, and as a leading student activist, she has a very large following.

National health care and welfare benefits cost billions every year.  Racial tensions between the largely working and middle class Hanmi (like Yeonhee) and the much smaller, mostly middle and upper class Zenyu (like the royal family) are at an all-time high.  No one in government can agree on policy at all, because the Zenyu only want to help the Zenyu and the Hanmi only want to help the Hanmi, and any attempt to compromise either or fails.

As far as Yeonhee and anybody with any sense is concerned, it would be much easier to chop the country in half and let the Zenyu rule the Zenyu and the Hanmi rule the Hanmi, and to get rid of the antiquated system of monarchy that drains the country’s resources and epitomises everything that’s wrong with society.

The king is fat, ill, and lazy.  The queen spends most of her time using taxpayer money to swan off to gala dinners in gowns that cost more than the average person will make in a year.

And the prince – don’t get Yeonhee started on the crown prince.  There aren’t very many people Yeonhee would wish dead, but Crown Prince Yixing might just meet the criteria for that.  He’s a national embarrassment and on a whole other level of useless.  For most of his teen years, he made international headlines for continually acting out, and now that he’s in his early twenties, he’s not much better.  He doesn’t really seem to do much (do princes even have jobs, or are they just a black hole for public money?), except sometimes give a couple of speeches, and he’s not even good at that.  Most of the country still remembers that infamous occasion where he turned up hungover as the guest speaker for Yeonhee’s sister’s graduation from the best university in the country and threw up all over the vice chancellor on live TV.  Genuinely, if there was one person Yeonhee could legally kill, it would be Prince Yixing, and out of sheer frustration.

But when the prime minister is assassinated by Hanmi radicals and the king slips into a coma, Prince Yixing is the only person with a decent shot at uniting the country, and by a series of unfortunate events that Yeonhee can trace back to a certain sketch she uploaded onto the internet, Yixing has decided she’s his key to bringing the nation back together.

If only she’d never taken the request of a lonely fan to draw the description they’d given of a perfect date.

If only.

Too late

Dead by 100

This one's still in draft status, so all I can really say is: watch this space.  Suho wolf au with fantasy/supernatural elements.  I'm still working on a blurb, but have a tagline:

Yoo Minjeong is kidnapped in a case of mistaken identity.  The kidnappers are looking to break a centuries-old curse, but also have to contend with a prophecy coming into fruition, which their curse is one of the only protections against: the ability to turn into wolves – which is slowly killing them each time they change.

Hopefully you enjoy them all!  If you want an update with a link when I post Dead by 100, it's probably worth subscribing (or if you're thinking long-term about the possible Kai-fic I mentioned), but if not, it's probably not worth it - just go click the links and enjoy the other fics :)

Korey