Maidens of the Fall, announcement post!

Octavia Carter hates magical girls.

Too bad for her. Now she’s one of them.

Octavia blames magical girls for the collateral damage that killed her parents and left her disabled. She resents their power as figureheads of the state, beyond reproach, beyond revenge. She hates their necessity; magical girls, young women chosen by the Dream-Gods of Earth, are the only ones who can turn back the Nightmares that creep through the open wound in reality, cut through England’s heart. In the decades since the wall between the waking world and the Dreamlands came crashing down, no amount of fire-power can match divine favour.

Octavia’s greatest wish is to go unnoticed, to avoid the government censors and the emotional hygiene officers, England’s front line in the war on dreams. She must swallow her rage and her desire. She must ignore a hopeless love for her best friend, though going to university is about to part them forever.

But then a magical girl attacks another one in broad daylight, in a terrorist bombing. Octavia finds herself arrested, both witness and suspect. The only way out is a contract with a Dream-God, but this divine trickster isn’t from Earth.

Fugitive, public enemy, her life in ruins, Octavia discovers there’s a whole other type of magical girl out there, and now she’s one of them. Freedom and revenge no longer seem impossible. If only her new ‘sisters’ weren’t just as broken as she. But the world can’t go on like this for much longer; things worse than Nightmares are seeping through the ragged edges of reality — Dreamers from the deep, echoes of strange Gods, and magical girls nobody recognises.

Octavia knows she’s a pawn in a cosmic game. Can she cross the board and become a queen, before the waking world comes apart at the seams?

Maidens of the Fall is a web serial about magical girls and cosmic horror, sapphic yearning and violent resistance, apocalypse and apotheosis.

It will launch on November 15th, 2025.

https://hungryshedgerow.net/maidens-of-the-fall/
(Website link contains the exact same thing as the blurb above!)

(Cover art by Carter W Jessup!)

Well, here it is! I don’t know what more to say! For now I’ll let the extended blurb and the front cover speak for themselves. (The cover art is also amazing, by the way, I cannot thank the artist enough, she's done an incredible job!)

I am vibrating with excitement for Maidens of the Fall; a lot of influences have gone into this, probably too many to list right here, and the characters are already taking over my brain. This is only the third time I’ve launched a new story, and I'm still very much making it up as I go along.

Maidens will be taking the ‘main slot’ in my schedule, replacing Katalepsis, so it’s going to be getting the lion’s share of my attention and writing time, just like Katalepsis did. At the moment I’m planning the same schedule as Katalepsis, publishing Saturday mornings GMT, on a 3-week-on-1-week-off-shedule.

The November 15th release date is my aim. I wanted it to be earlier, on November 1st, but I decided to push it back a little bit, to give the story all the time it needed for planning, outlining, exploring the characters, and writing a nice big chunk before anything comes out, so I can go back and make sure everything is right before I carry on ahead. That’s what I’ve been doing behind the scenes for the last month and a half! I’m almost a full arc deep and still digging, and dying to just release it all right now. But! I’m going to be sensible, I’m going to stick to my plan, and finish the opening arc before publishing the first chapter.

Patrons might get something before November 15th; I’m not sure yet. I might do that a week early, or I might just release multiple chapters for patrons on the 15th all at once. The old Katalepsis patreon tier will be retired and replaced with a new Maidens of the Fall tier; if you’re still subscribed to the Katalepsis tier, feel 100% free to stay there, and you’ll get advance chapters for Maidens as well, so you don't need to change anything.

Oh, and you might notice the new website is a bit different to how I've done this in the past.

Kata and Necro have their own dedicated websites, and while I do really enjoy doing that, giving every one of my stories a separate site would start to rack up higher costs, especially if I’m going to keep being a writer for the foreseeable future! So I’ve decided to take the step of making a personal ‘hub’ site; it’s a bit bare-bones thus far, as I’ve been putting all my energy into the new story, so I might add some more things to it in the future. Maidens will be published over there, and on Royal Road and Scribblehub, just like Kata and Necro.

And … that’s all for now!

If you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask away. Otherwise, you’ll be meeting a bunch of dangerous magical girls in just a few more weeks. I'll seeya then!