The Complete Collection
The Lost
Soldier
"The past is never dead. It is not even past. It is simply waiting in the mud for the rain to fall again."
"The past is never dead. It is not even past. It is simply waiting in the mud for the rain to fall again."
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In the mud of Flanders...
For Elias Vance, the Great War never truly ended. It lives in the phantom ache of his amputated leg and in the memory of a house that shouldn't exist.
When Elias breaks the seal to free her, he unleashes forces far older and darker than the war itself. Hunted by the Thule Society, Elias and Élise must race across a recovering Europe to find the Weaver's Harp.
Discover other worlds and stories by Alli De Vare.
A cursed Roman fish-sauce factory. A haunted valley outside Antioch. Two brothers with nothing left to lose. The House of Mist blends visceral Roman history with slow-burn gothic horror against living architecture that remembers every crime.
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This is not a sequel. It is an escalation. It takes the curse across continents, transforming a story about a cursed commodity into a story about consciousness itself as a weapon. What if the force destroying humanity is not evil, but evolutionary?
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Six months after their escape, broke and hunted, Marcus and Gaius are hired to steal the Opobalsamum - a sacred resin that grows only in hidden groves. The sap doesn't just smell extraordinary; it opens doors to knowledge that Rome fears.
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The Land doesn't recognize ink. It knew weight. Blood. Salt. A visceral tale set in the heavy, wooded bottomlands where the clear, freezing waters of the Saline Creek violently collide with the muddy runoff of the Mississippi River.
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The Thalassocrat SagaBefore he was the Thalassocrat, he was a boy named Tarkon. Salt and Ash is the anatomy of a trauma, following his visceral descent into the pirate hive of Olympos to break the Roman cage. The sea has no walls.
AmazonHistorical Dossiers: From the trenches of Flanders to the sands of the East.
The crucible of the saga. Where Elias Vance lost his foot and found something else.
Deep in the desert, where the brothers buried the cursed Golden Garum.
A cramped harbor where whispers are currency and secrets older than Rome are revealed.
Home to the Opobalsamum. Sacred resin planted by Solomon himself.
Where the clear Saline Creek collides with the muddy Mississippi.
A sprawling pirate fortress built of stolen timber and Roman masonry.
Perry County, Missouri
"The paper fades. The iron rusts. Only the stone remains."
The focal point is the Perryville Basin, where the clear, freezing waters of the Saline Creek violently collide with the muddy runoff of the Mississippi River.
Modern Day: The area near Perryville and St. Mary, Missouri. An isolated stretch of heavy bottomlands along the old road from Ste. Genevieve.
Answer these three questions to discover your role in the Secret Railway.
Suppressed testimonies from the world of Alli De Vare.
The House of Mist
"If your recipe requires a sacrifice, you are not the cook. You are the meal."
"To bind the flavor, one must bind the spirit. The fish is the body. The salt is the soul. But the Golden Taste requires the breath of the unborn."
The Silk of Spiders
"The Royal Road was not merely a path; it was a nervous system, and they were the virus moving slowly along its spine."
"The Silk of Spiders is not a poetic name... It comes from the spaces between worlds. It binds things together. Souls. Empires. Flesh."
The Lost Soldier Saga
"The war wasn’t against the Germans; it was against the very earth, a sucking, monstrous mud that pulled men down and turned them into something akin to animals."
"They think I am crazy, but I am merely cursed with seeing the truth: that the past is not dead. It is not even past."
The Keeper of the Fork
"The Land doesn't recognize ink. It knew weight. Blood. Salt."
"You don’t fight the pulling. You let it slide under you... When you stop trying to stand on the land and start moving with it, only then does the land let you pass."
Salt and Ash
"Rome owns the earth; it measures the world in paces, taxes it in silver, and marks it with the branding iron. But the sea has no roads. The sea has no walls."
"This is the history of the men who stopped being victims and started being the storm."
A Little Room Upstairs
Chantal de Geus doesn’t just write stories; she captures the friction of living. Originally from South Africa and now living with her family in the Netherlands, Chantal is a writer of short stories, poetry, and what she calls "excessive" long-form articles.
She was "gently redirected" to Substack because her work refuses to be small or brief. It needs room to breathe, and it demands that the reader slows down to meet it. Her message is found in the "immaculate slice of lived life." She looks at the unpleasant events we usually try to hide and finds the lyricism within them.
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In a world obsessed with polished surfaces, Chantal's story strips away the veneer to reveal the raw, beating heart of humanity. Set against the backdrop of South African zinc roofs and oil-scented kitchens, her narrative captures the profound dignity found in everyday survival. It is vital because it refuses to look away, transforming the grit of tension and poverty into a masterful, lyrical testament to human endurance.
Her style understands contradiction: how pride is often built on bruises, and how love is frequently tied to the grit of survival. Laughter lingers near tragedy, and the most "normal" surfaces often cost the most to maintain.
"Voice is intimate, unhurried, yet heavy with what it knows. The writing is clean, rhythmic, deeply human. Every sentence trusts its silence; every image lands exactly where it hurts most. There’s no overreach, no indulgence - just truth, layered in tenderness and unpleasant events. You don’t read this story; you inhale it, and it stays with you like smoke."
This section is a dedicated home for Selective Authors - voices from every corner of the globe who refuse to trade depth for brevity. We are looking for the "archivists of human friction." If you write with the same unhurried, intimate truth as Chantal de Geus, we want to hear from you.
Submit Your Work
of the Secret Railway
Alli De Vare does not write stories; he excavates them from the strata of silence. He is a self-appointed conductor of the Secret Railway, that subterranean network where suppressed testimonies and the ghosts of the official record huddle in the dark. To Alli, history is not a series of dates, but a copper-salt drip through the limestone of time - persistent, corrosive, and heavy with the weight of what was.
For years, he has lived in the quiet tension of the "Great Unearthing." His study is a landscape of sedimentary ambition, filled with many works from the past that have spent decades collecting a fine, silver dust. These are not merely drafts; they are dormant artifacts waiting for the right frequency to wake.
Performing a delicate sort of literary alchemy.
Alli’s work operates on the axiom that a haunting is not a phantom in a doorway, but a subtle wrongness in the air. He writes for the reader who understands that the past doesn't stay behind us - it permeates the soil, the silk, and the very stone of our lives. He currently resides in the liminal spaces between the archive and the legend, understanding that survival is the cruelest transformation of all.