World on Fire
Supernatural Horror · Urban Fantasy · 3 Books + Prequel Novella
Three novels and a prequel novella. A legendary Hunter dragged out of his self-imposed prison sentence. An adopted daughter whose eyes are starting to do something they shouldn't. And the slow, terrible discovery that the people in charge of fighting demons have been losing the war from the inside for longer than anyone wants to admit.
World on Fire is the spine of my connected universe — the first books I wrote where the rules got fixed. Hell is real. Demons walk among us. The small community of people who know it call themselves Hunters, and they have been losing more than they save for a very long time. The trilogy is what happens when one of their best men is forced back into the work, and his daughter Abigail is forced to face the question of what she actually is.
I wrote these books because I wanted to find out what it costs to keep doing the work when the work refuses to be finished. Arthur Vangeest has been doing it for decades by the time you meet him. He is exhausted. He is unsafe to be around. He loves his daughter more than anything else in the world, and he is genuinely terrified of what she is becoming. That is the engine of the whole series — a father trying to protect a child from a war he dragged her into, and a daughter slowly figuring out that the war is also her birthright.
If you came in through the Alexa game Dark Citadel, or you have read World of Shadows, or you are starting here cold — World on Fire is the foundation. Everything else in the connected universe leans on it.
The Books
The Ninth Circle (Prequel Novella)
Before Raven's Peak. Before the Council pulled Arthur Vangeest out of the prison he locked himself in. Before any of this.
A West Virginia manor. A cult that calls itself The Ninth Circle. A wife and a daughter. A father who had built a life he thought he could keep, and the single night that took it away from him.
The Ninth Circle is the wound the rest of the trilogy circles around. It is the reason Arthur ended up underground for five years. It is the reason he found a child named Abigail and raised her as his own. Start here if you want the breaking. Start with Raven's Peak if you want the rebuild.
Get The Ninth Circle (Prequel Novella) on Amazon →
Book 1: Raven's Peak
Frieda Gotlieb walks into the basement Arthur has been rotting in for five years and tells him there is a town in the Rocky Mountains where people have started killing each other for no reason. The Council needs him. He does not want to go.
Abigail goes anyway. She is grown now — quiet, precise, very good with a revolver, and carrying a question about herself that she has been refusing to ask. Raven's Peak is the abandoned mining town where she finds the first piece of the answer, and where a demon called Belphegor finds her first.
Theology graduate Haatim Arison stumbles in from the outside, paid to tail a woman he does not understand by a man who is not who he says he is. He thinks he is a journalist. He is going to be something else by the time the snow melts.
Three people. One demon old enough to have watched empires burn. One town that should not have been built where it was.
Book 2: Raven's Fall
The Council of Chaldea has stood since 1573. It will not survive Raven's Fall.
Something inside the organization has been hollowing it out for longer than anyone realized — not a single traitor, not a cell, but a pattern of small compromises stretching back decades. By the time Frieda Gotlieb sees the shape of it, the rot is the institution. Hunters are dying in the field. Coordinators are being murdered in their own offices. A demon called Nida is running operatives across three continents and enjoying every minute of it.
Abigail is changing. Her eyes have started catching the wrong light. The skills she trained for her whole life have begun to feel small next to whatever is waking up underneath them. Haatim is falling for her at exactly the wrong moment. And Arthur is realizing that the conspiracy he is trying to stop has been quietly using his own family against him for years.
The middle book is where the floor falls out. Everything you thought the trilogy was about gets bigger.
Book 3: Raven's Rise
Surgat is coming through.
He is a Demon Lord with his own section of Hell and thousands of demons under his command, and he has spent millennia working toward a single goal — to walk into our world bodily, with his legions, and finish what he started before he was bound. The seals holding him back are failing. The Council that was supposed to notice has been infiltrated for so long that the warning never came. And a small band of Hunters who should not stand a chance — Arthur, Abigail, Haatim, Frieda, and the last loyal operatives left — are the only ones with a plan.
The plan is to walk into Surgat's domain and kill him on his own ground.
Raven's Rise is the longest book in the trilogy and the one I rewrote the most. It is about what it costs to win when the only victory available requires giving something up that does not grow back. Abigail's transformation is the visible price. There are quieter prices paid by everyone else. By the end, the people who walk out of Hell are not the same people who walked in — and the world they walk back into is not the same world either.
Meet the Characters
The Hunters
Arthur Vangeest — Protagonist
Legendary Hunter. Husband and father once. Then a cult called The Ninth Circle walked into his West Virginia manor in a single night and took both away. He spent five years underground after that, in a prison of his own choosing. Frieda Gotlieb is the only person alive who could have gotten him out. He is terse, dark-humored, and uses up his own body the way other men use up matches.
Abigail — Protagonist
Arthur's adopted daughter. He pulled her out of a cult operation when she was small. He raised her, trained her, and made her one of the most dangerous Hunters in the world. She carries a scar on her right cheek from before. The walls are thicker than the scar. Her arc is the spine of the trilogy — and what wakes up inside her at Raven's Peak forces the question the whole series has been circling: what is she, underneath the training?
Haatim Arison — Protagonist
A theology graduate with a blog and a wealthy family back in India. No combat training when the series starts. What he has instead — deep knowledge of comparative religion, a stubborn refusal to look away, and a rare ability called channeling that nobody, including him, anticipated — turns out to matter quite a bit. His father, Aram, is a Council member. That relationship gets heavier every book.
Frieda Gotlieb — Protagonist
Council of Chaldea operative and field commander. She freed Arthur from the prison he locked himself in because the work needed him more than his guilt did. She quotes Nietzsche, wears a white business suit when she needs to and black leather when she does not, and is considerably more dangerous than people who underestimate her tend to figure out in time.
The Things in the Dark
Belphegor — Demon Lord
Ancient. Patient. Strategic in the way of things that measure time in centuries. He moves through human vessels like a guest checking into a hotel, and the bodies do not last. He wants something hidden in Raven's Peak. He is willing to burn the town down to get it.
Surgat — Demon Lord
The thing behind the things. Surgat rules his own section of Hell with thousands of demons under his command, and the entire trilogy has been building toward the moment a human team has to face him on his ground. The trilogy exists, in large part, to answer whether that is even a question that has an answer.
Nida — Greater Demon
She hunts Hunters. Methodical, patient, sadistic in the clinical sense — she does not just want results, she wants the experience. She moves wrong in a way you notice before you can name it. At the end of Raven's Fall she is still at large.
Christoph and Delaphene — Greater Demons
Siblings. A doctor and a nurse. Two Greater Demons coordinating an operation the way human partners coordinate — splitting tasks, playing complementary roles, finishing each other's plans. The thing that makes them genuinely hard to deal with is not the raw power. It is that they cooperate, which demons almost never do.
Aram — Council Antagonist
Haatim's father. A high-ranking Council member who made deals he convinced himself were necessary to protect his son. He is not a cartoon villain. He is a man who sold one decision twenty years ago for one good reason and then sold one more, and then one more. By the time anyone notices the pattern, the pattern is the institution.
What This Series Is Really About
World on Fire is built on a single load-bearing rule: this is not a world where good triumphs. It is a world where good is paid for. Every victory in the trilogy costs something — a relationship, a body, a piece of someone's interior life — that does not grow back. If a scene wanted to give victory away cheap, I rewrote it until it did not. That is the axiom under everything.
Faith works in these books, but not the way fantasy usually treats faith. It is not magical thinking and it is not a chosen-one bloodline. It is an operational substance, and it costs the user something to wield. A priest who has not been to confession in a year cannot perform a clean exorcism — not because some divine bureaucracy is auditing him, but because the working itself runs on the operator's interior coherence, and a man at war with himself is a porous tool. The trilogy is, among other things, about whether Arthur can re-acquire what he used to be in time to do one more morning of work.
The conspiracy inside the Council is the part of the worldbuilding I worked hardest to keep honest. There is no shadow cabal in a smoke-filled room. There are people who sold a single decision twenty years ago for one good reason and were asked for another, and another, until they were not the people they used to be. Real institutions die this way. The supernatural overlay just makes the dying visible.
The trilogy ends in Hell, and the team that goes through is not the team that comes back. Abigail's transformation is the loudest price paid, but it is not the largest. The largest price is borne by the survivors who have to keep living in a world where they remember, in detail, what it took. That is the World on Fire. The Hunters are who we have. They will lose more than they save. And it is still worth doing.
Fans of Constantine, Supernatural, The Dresden Files, The Exorcist, and Hellblazer will feel right at home here.
Content warnings: Graphic violence, demonic possession and exorcism, body horror, torture, ritualistic self-harm, PTSD and grief, death of family, strong language. Adult readers 17+.
World on Fire is part of Lincoln Cole's connected fiction universe — a shelf of series that share characters and lore.
Lincoln Cole also builds voice games for Amazon Alexa — explore the Alexa games.
Every available book in World on Fire is in Kindle Unlimited — read it free with your subscription, or buy your copy on Amazon.
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