Epic fantasy with genuinely alien perspectives.
Unfathered is a multi-POV epic fantasy set in the Five Kingdoms — a world where three radically different cultures view each other through incompatible lenses. The novel weaves three threads that converge at Praetoria, a recently conquered capital where political upheaval drives multiple factions into crisis.
Thread 1: The Hival. Ivan and Natascha come from Donkov Hive, a clone society organized around genetic lineages called "creshes." They've been dispatched into the Five Kingdoms to find a "wildseed" — new genetic stock to reverse declining fertility. They think in terms of genetic fitness and cresh loyalty. The "beastmen" of the Five Kingdoms are exotic and slightly horrifying to them.
Thread 2: The Court. Duke Andronicus navigates the court of Leone, where King Savvus's military victories mask a disintegrating domestic situation: a queen succumbing to magical manipulation, a scheming advisor wielding mind-control magic, and a political marriage that will bastardize the heir. Court intrigue rendered through physical sensation and behavior, not exposition.
Thread 3: The Zin. Ancient reptilian centaurs — the largest weigh over 30,000 pounds — whose waterbound elders are dying of plague. A caravan sets out to find alpenwort, the one treatment that works, via a trade route through mountain passes. The Zin think in geological timescales, with different gender and reproduction systems than anything else in the world.
The novel's commitment to genuinely alien perspectives. Hival characters don't just look different — they think differently, value differently, process the world through an entirely foreign frame. The Zin aren't "big lizard people" but beings whose experience of time, reproduction, and social organization has no human analogue. And the humans of the Five Kingdoms, seen through non-human eyes, are just as strange.
The religious system is rich: a Trinity with dark aspects, split into Umbral (mystery-oriented) and Victus (life-affirming) sects, with the shift from one to the other serving as a political weapon. The prose targets adult readers with a show-don't-tell style — emotions are rendered through physical sensation and behavior, never named.
| Chapter | POV | Thread | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ch 1 | Natascha | Thread 1 | Drafted (7/8 scenes) |
| Ch 2 | Andronicus | Thread 2 | Drafted (all 8 scenes) |
| Ch 3 | Ivan | Thread 1 | Drafted (6/8 scenes) |
| Ch 4 | Mary (Zin) | Thread 3 | Drafted (4/5 scenes) |
| Ch 5 | Kylos | Thread 2 | Drafted (all 8 scenes) |
| Ch 6 | Natascha | Threads 1+3 | Drafted (all 8 scenes) |
| Ch 7 | Mineus | Thread 2 | Drafted (5/8 scenes) |
| Ch 8–17 | Various | All | Outlined |
Genre: Epic fantasy, multi-POV
Length: ~17 chapters planned (7 drafted)
Target reader: Adult, college-graduate level
Style: Show-don't-tell, physical sensation over named emotion