THE SUNDERED MARCHES are not safe or simple; they're alive.

Revolution is in the air. Not an uprising of liberty alone, but also of industry, finance, agriculture, and society, each change forking into three others like an unending chain of lightning.

The empire demands saltpeter and gold, but takes blood and steel too. The rebellion asks pint-sized pipsqueaks to strap rockets to their back and fly; many never come back. The moon bleeds, the pen is mightier than the pistol, and wandering witches live on leather and lightning.

The soil of Alovis, from the lowest point of Lanva Crater to the peaks of the Meteoras and the Vencht Mountains, is riven with good and evil. What few roots find purchase in the prairie soil drink deep of both; life chases power like a lonely weed turns to sunlight, even if only to see another day's dawn.

What people and empires do for that light, the lies they tell themselves over it, and how the very best and worst of those lies spring up from truths – that is what the Sundered Marches, and every single nation of Alovis, is about. It's the story of every skyship, it shadows bandits, buckaroos, and banshees, and it sings with each note in a cosmofonist's score.

There's a war on, but there's a world still living around it, too. Hold on to your knickers, friends; it's going to be one wild ride.

Let Meteora Meet Mettle

By: Cynthia, on 2 May 2026

The Lanvan Revolutionary Aerie made a deal with a daredevil: strap a winged rocket to your back and you’re an officer. Knickers (well, Flight-Lieutenant Nicodemus Justinian Rose) hasn’t yet managed to win the Sundered Marches their freedom, but he did accidentally rope his baby brother into the war.

While deep in occupied Miltahwark on a sabotage mission, a fiend marked by a thousand amethyst eyes massacres the unit. With the two brothers separated, survival, reunion, and success each seem unlikely. All three? Impossible.

Threading fate’s needle will depend on the survivors joining arms with the legendary Buckaroo Banshee – a one-eyed, leathery old witch bearing half a century of trouble and lightning - and the Iron Gale, a convict conscript that has more secrets than murder charges.

Countless eyes watch the heavens above Lanva; iron, grit, and a tailor’s wit will have to do. Let Meteora meet Mettle.

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Dungeons and Dragons

By: Cynthia, on 19 December 2024

The Calm Before the Storm

By: Cynthia, on 20 March 2022

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Honest Work

By: Cynthia, on 2 May 2026

Meteor City was the biggest of boomtowns: an ugly, sprawling expanse, built in haste on the prairie wastes. The place was littered with skyships, docking towers, lodging houses, and most especially bordellos, built in every color of timber and bracketed in brightly painted signs.

Mara Bloom reckoned that there were forests with less wood than Meteor City.

But lumber shipments were hard to get across the mountains these days. For those cases there were tents. Big ones. The striped affair sitting on the end of this dusty street was near as big as the Lanva Royale, and it still had a line coming out of it that stretched all the way around the block, ending in front of a building covered in scandalously shapely masculine silhouettes.

The large woman made a note to visit when she was done. Assuming she got the recruitment bounty, anyway. She still wasn’t sure that she’d talk her way through that; she wasn’t even sure she’d talk herself into staying long enough to try. The line was long, noisy, and dense enough to be humid despite the dry galeren sun, and she didn’t have any interest in being a rebel for its own sake.

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Seasoned¹, award-winning² author Cynthia Skye has been writing books for 22 years now; Meteora × Mettle will be her sixth completed novel. The Sundered Marches setting began as a lark in mid-2019, with two goals: to create unique, fun characters that everyone can enjoy, and then take them as seriously as possible, and to explore the economic aftereffects of a magical plague that hit a magical republic at the height of its empire.³

In accordance with the prophecy, the Sundered Marches has been developed through a 200,000 word tabletop RPG supplement, a released book, a soundtrack available on YouTube Music, and an unreleased book. M×M is the definitive reimagination of the first book, with the benefit of experience and thought.

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¹ 3 cloves minced garlic; salt and black pepper to taste.
² Most improved in 9th grade band.
³ Cynthia would like to emphasize that she began writing this setting in the summer of 2019, and leaves it as an exercise for the reader to determine if she is prophetic or merely unfortunate.