There is no night in the Everburning City. There can never be. ***** For four hundred years the Everburning City has withstood the advance of the life-strangling fog known as the Gloam. Its walls have held back five invasions, but on the eve of the sixth, the city's inhabitants know things have changed. Golems are coming out of the mist, and the bodies of the dead are rising at the Gloam's bidding. The city's last and most desperate line of defence comes in the form of the Crafters, individuals who can channel the power of fire, though they risk their sanity each time they do. The brightest of these valiant heroes are Tabitha a'Loria and her apprentice Gerald Reath. Risking their lives, they mount their airships, determined to save the last bastion of humanity - the Everburning City. [[word count: 100,000-150,000 words]]

*This story is set in Novusverse, meaning that the majority gender roles are flipped, i.e. men being feminine, and women being masculine. This specific version of Earth in Novusverse has been radically altered by both this different dynamic and by the presence of supernatural species. Jay gets paid to do nothing but stand or sit in place for hours at a time. Really. That's all she has to do. And it's incredibly dangerous. As a hypno-immune human in a world of vampires, werewolves, wizards, and more, Jay and the company she works for provides a valuable resource: a guarantee that when two parties meet to negotiate deals, sign contracts, or even end wars, the less-advantaged can't be hypnotized into signing away the kingdom. When her employer decides to take a high-profile contract that turns out to be far more than anyone bargained for, Jay's life becomes far more complicated than she's prepared for - and suddenly her policy of "not my problem" can't help her now. Because it's very much her problem: her boss's life is in her hands, the young vampire femboy she took home a few nights ago is way more involved than he's letting on, and a demon-hybrid wizard keeps showing up and picking through her stuff. Worst of all, the Crown of Mortal Magic seems to have disappeared from their city. Which means that if Jay wants to keep her boss alive and get answers to her growing list of questions, she's going to have to stop running from her problems and do the one thing her job should normally never require: facing the enemy head-on.