Verada Requiem
Dark Fantasy — 5 Books
A teenage thief trained in the shadows of a dying world must survive a demonic plague that devours nations — and the holy army that might be worse than the monsters it fights.
I started writing Verada Requiem because I wanted to tell a story about a kid who isn't special. Ren Aldric doesn't have magical powers. He's not a chosen one. He's a seventeen-year-old thief who knows how to pick locks, read people, and run. And when the world ends around him — literally, when crystalline demons erupt from beneath his city and devour everything he knows — those skills are all he has.
The thing is, survival stories are only interesting when they cost something. When every choice closes a door behind it. Ren survives the fall of Harrowfeld, finds his way into the ranks of the Army of the Immaculate, and spends five books slowly realizing that the institution protecting humanity is just as willing to hollow out its own soldiers as it is to kill demons. The branding system, the fanaticism, the Hierophant who considers mercy a sin — all of it is the point.
Verada Requiem is dark fantasy in the truest sense. It doesn't pull punches. But it's also a story about found family — about the people Ren refuses to leave behind even when leaving would be safer. About what it means to hold onto your humanity when everything around you is designed to strip it away.
The Books
Book 1: The Thief's Canticle
Ren Aldric has spent two years mastering lockpicks under his mentor's patient eye. The vault job that should have been his proving ground becomes the night everything ends. Crystalline demons erupt from beneath Harrowfeld's streets, devouring the city from the inside out. Ren watches his guild family fall one by one.
Alone on the northern road with a dying alchemist's notes and a mysterious boneglass figurine, he follows a band of survivors straight into the Army of the Immaculate's vast staging camp. The church army is humanity's best hope against the demonic tide. It is also run by a Hierophant whose conviction allows no room for mercy.
Book 2: The Exile's Litany
Ren marches south with the Army as a thief in a soldier's war — using lockpicks and alchemy where other men use divine brands. His assignment: read what the army cannot see. Demon settlements built with deliberate architecture. Boneglass growths following geometric channels carved before the church was born. A western darkness consuming light itself, advancing three feet each day.
What he finds in the ruins and shrines rewrites everything. Demons are building civilizations. Ancient pre-Verada shrines lie buried beneath church foundations. And in a heretical journal left by a dead alchemist, Ren finds the question no one in the army dares ask.
Book 3: The Soldier's Hymn
Ren is lead scout for the Cathedral Province campaign, watching the branding system quietly consume the people he's fought to keep alive — his companions losing pieces of themselves with every inscribed sigil. The war is a machine designed to replace people with weapons, and the heretic reputation protecting him has a shelf life.
Then a cathedral infiltration puts him face to face with a fused demon guardian that speaks to him directly. What the boneglass network knows about the war, the gods, and the Dimming is either Ren's leverage — or the Hierophant's reason to burn them all.
Book 4: The Heretic's Communion
Ren's mentor is dead. What wears Tik's body now executes guild raids with eerie precision, collecting emotional anchors, growing more coherent by the day. When Ren finally faces the creature, it speaks in Tik's teaching voice — and the blade stays sheathed.
The war fractures around him: the Hierophant authorizes civilian purges, a secular lord positions Ren as a political weapon, and intelligence converges on the Crucible — a living wound in the Sunderlands that bleeds demons into the world. Ren must lead a suicide infiltration into its depths. The army assaults the surface. He goes below.
Book 5: The Survivor's Requiem
Twelve go in. Three come out.
When every frontal assault against the Crucible fails, Ren proposes the only option left: twelve soldiers, a mine shaft, and fourteen demolition charges. But the Crucible is alive — its passages breathe, its walls learn, its defenders adapt. At its heart lies not a command center but a wound in reality itself, slowly killing an ancient boneglass entity that has spent millennia trying to seal it.
The demons they've slaughtered for five years were never the enemy. They were antibodies of a dying god.
What This Series Is Really About
Verada Requiem pulls four things against each other the entire way through.
The cost of survival — what you trade away to keep going, and whether you're still recognizably yourself when you do. Ren never gets a free pass. Every smart move has a downstream consequence.
Institutional evil — how organizations designed to protect people end up consuming them. The branding system isn't a sudden horror. It's a slow one. You watch it happen to people Ren loves in real time, and the worst part is that every step makes a certain kind of sense.
Found family — the stubborn, irrational decision to stay with people even when leaving would be smarter. Ren is not a hero in any classical sense. He's someone who refuses to let go of the few people who feel like home.
Faith vs. fanaticism — the difference between believing in something and being weaponized by it. The Army of the Immaculate isn't wrong that the demons are dangerous. That's what makes it complicated.
I know this from personal experience: the best dark fantasy isn't dark for the sake of it. The darkness has to mean something, has to be in service of the people caught inside it. That's what I was going for with this series. I think Verada Requiem is the most honest thing I've written.
Verada Requiem is part of Lincoln Cole's connected fiction universe — a shelf of series that share characters and lore.
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Verada Requiem is coming soon to Amazon in Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.
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