Enter a world where high magic meets high technology
This first volume of Tales of Metamor City collects ten short stories and novellas from the Parsec Award-winning Metamor City Podcast. Enter a gritty urban landscape of mages and vampires, faeries and telepaths, where street-level spies steal arcane artifacts from power-hungry sorcerers and holy warriors stalk demons through the shadowy depths of thousand-foot-high towers.
Thirteen hundred years ago, the conquering wizard Nasoj cast three great spells on the people of Metamor Keep. Fueled by the power of the dark gods, these spells would irrevocably change the castle’s defenders in body and soul, rendering them helpless against his advancing armies.
Things did not work out as he hoped.
The spells were countered, but only partially. They wove together with the castle’s own magic, becoming a Curse that blanketed the entire valley. But Nasoj’s forces were driven back, and the Keep’s heroic inhabitants learned to take pride in the new forms the Curse had given them: a mark of how deeply the Dark Wizard feared them.
Now, the world sits on the cusp of the twenty-first century, and things have changed more than anyone could have dreamed. Buildings the size of mountains rise above the valley floor. People walk and skimmers drive on suspended walkways hundreds of meters in the air. Magic and technology work hand-in-hand to do the impossible. Majestrix Kyia, the spirit of the ancient Keep, now rules with peace and justice over an Empire that covers half a continent.
But there is always darkness, even in a place as bright as Metamor City. The rich grow ever richer, while the poor struggle in the hardscrabble world of The Street, surrounded by menacing gangs armed with guns, knives and unlicensed magic. Vampires control a shadow-government that feeds the city’s illicit hungers, while a mysterious collective of psychics pursues their own inscrutable ends.
It is a world on the knife’s edge between order and chaos, creation and destruction.
It is a world in need of heroes.
This book collects the following Metamor City stories:
- Welcome to the City
- House Call (first time in print)
- Huntress
- The Sentinel
- The Muse
- Troubled Minds
- Make Believe (by Bryan Watson; first time in print)
- Whispers in the Wood
- A Lightbringer’s Christmas Tale (first time in print)
- A Lightbringer Carol
(316 pages; audiobook, trade paperback and e-book)
“Chris Lester weaves together Urban Fantasy, Sword and Sorcery, Mystery, Drama, Noir, Action, and Erotica together so masterfully that it should be its own genre.”
—Jason G., Amazon reader
“Dark, beautiful, moody melodrama with a ubiquitous erotic edge and always a sense of wonder. You’re gonna love it.”
—J. Daniel Sawyer, author of AND THEN SHE WAS GONE and THE RESURRECTION JUNKET