Elemental Necromancer

In a galaxy still scarred by old wars, where alien empires trade in secrets, warring spirits stalk the dark between worlds, and gods meddle where they should not, power has a color and a name. The gifted are called Elemorts, and their gifts are the oldest forces there are: rock and metal, ice and shadow, the feline snarl, the comet's fire, the green of growing things, the sound that walks men off their feet.

The Cabal of the Helix wants those gifts kneeling. Its masked faithful, led by a schoolteacher turned zealot named Phoenix, have dug open gates buried since before the wars and raised a machine they call the Ablator, which drinks the glow out of a mer the way a lamp drinks oil. Behind the Cabal stands something colder: Oracle, a corporation with a silver-voiced broker named Corvair, a machine on the moon, and an insurance scheme priced in worlds. When the Halo lights, every power on every planet gutters out at once, and the nations will pay yearly to be spared the fever. All the plot lacks is its key, the Nova Conduit, and the Conduit has just walked out of a dungeon.

Nine outcasts stand between the sky and the fire, and not one of them is a hero by trade. A commando awaits court-martial for a shot no one saw him fire. A banker who boxes with shadows runs the quiet ledgers of the Bank of Loogmor. A metal-bender mourns a family ruined by the dragonsalt trade. An ice-wielder carries a drowned lake and a stolen set of blueprints. An actress with dark-orange claws and a stubborn cat refuses to die quietly. A green-fingered healer seeds battlefields with flowers. A comet-caller with expensive taste owes money to the wrong three people. A transport heiress flies anything with an engine and counts every head twice. And in a cell built for exactly that sits X-lash Riplartz, the orphan prince of Wystalline, convicted of stealing his father's ledgers, armed with a string, a spoon, and a grudge.

The old files of Yilabar's court have a word for what the prince becomes when he takes up the Conduit, and it is not a kind one. Necromancer: the one who binds. The one who makes the drained rise again. His sister the princess wants him delivered by the pound. Phoenix wants him kneeling in her garden rows. Corvair wants him as scrap. What X-lash wants is to return some fingerprints.

To stop an ignition that will burn every gift out of the galaxy, the nine must do what no court and no cult ever managed: braid rock, metal, ice, shadow, feline, comet, sound, and green into one light, and let the boy with the dead court accent conduct. Elemental Necromancer is an ensemble space fantasy of heists, tribunals, duels, and digging sites, where every mask hides a face you have met, every debt comes due, and the drained are not as gone as the galaxy would like to believe.