QSFer Sax Brightwell has a new queer sci-fi romance (bi, trans FTM) out, Secrets of Sleipnir book 1: Low Dawn.
A steamy queer romance on an alien world. A story of hidden histories, shattered destinies, and Really Big Animals.
Fiyeli has a pretty good life on the ringed moon Sleipnir. He has friends all over, and even a few casual lovers, if not the belonging and devotion his heart has never stopped seeking.
He’s made a career of sorts out of crossing the treacherous Sea of Glass, carrying messages and guiding travelers through the massive impact crater separating the northern and southern forests. Escorting a girl prince and a boy princess on their betrothal caravan to the western sea should be a similar job, just bigger (a lot bigger).
But when a chance encounter with a remnant of the tyrannical Kingdom of Heaven forces him deeper beneath the surface of Sleipnir than he’s ever gone before, what he discovers there will upend the life he’s built, and the secrets he built it on…
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Excerpt
There was more metallic creaking and groaning than Fiyeli really liked as the ancient structure took his weight, but he supposed that was to be expected. Once past the crumpled ‘entryway,’ the corridor was wide enough he could stand up and walk, using the wall as the floor. It got pretty dark a little further in, and he considered going back out and sacrificing part of his clothes to make a torch on the end of his staff, but then he spotted light up ahead, enough to see by (barely) as he made his way toward it.
He was expecting the light to be daylight admitted by another hole in the structure. He was not expecting it to be emanating from an object lying across the floor – what would have been oriented vertically against the wall when the Moonflower was upright. It was a large tube, of some milky-translucent material, and there was a shape inside. Fiyeli drew closer, and realised the shape was a person. He drew closer still, crouched down, brushed off some dust, and was dismayed but not wholly shocked to see Rossolay’s androgynous, heart-shaped face inside – minus the yellow ringlets.
Another thing the histories agreed on was that Celestials all looked virtually identical, be they female, male, or intersex (and one account insisted individuals could change sex as trivially as commoners changed their clothes – next to that, manifesting golden hair and eyes was probably nothing). In the Kingdom of Heaven there was only one face, and one form: tall and rangy, with broad shoulders yet narrow limbs, with skin the deepest possible black and beautiful long-fingered hands like the ones folded neatly beneath the breasts of the woman sleeping in the tube.
So, Rossolay hadn’t been lying – and perhaps this also explained how he’d survived. The tube looked quite sturdy; maybe another like it was sturdy enough to survive being suspended in glass for five hundred years before being chipped free by scrappers. But how had the scrappers awakened the sleeper within their tube?
There were buttons on a square panel on the side of the tube, the side nearest Fiyeli, and below them a glowing panel in the shape of a hand. Fiyeli was just reminding himself that the scrappers waking Rossolay up had turned out extremely badly, and so he was by no means going to touch any of those controls, when yet another black Celestial face popped up in the gloom on the far side of the tube from him.
“Are you real?” asked the very same voice Fiyeli had last heard saying ‘I will enjoy training you.’
Fiyeli screamed. The Celestial also screamed.
Author Bio
Sax Brightwell has been writing self-indulgent smut about men who are ride-or-die for each other since 2014. They were delighted when one reviewer described their brand as “absolutely filthy but also very sweet.” They were as surprised as anyone in 2023 when an idea took the bit in its teeth and turned into the novel ‘Low Dawn.’ Sax has a background in biology, and a foreground in nursing. They agreed suspiciously quickly when their youngest child asked to start an aquarium.