Gift of the Scarlet Shadow
by A. Spencer Popp

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Fargus never thought he was meant for greatness. A simple human fisherman with a simple life, his world is upended when he is conscripted into a war against a marauding clan of orcs. Ill-prepared for battle, he flees when the notorious hell-drake Utillax the Horrible rains chaos upon both armies. As word of his flight spreads across the empire, the fearsome Ecthber Knights on orders from the high king himself are dispatched to pursue and punish Fargus for his cowardice. However, when Fargus meets Farunda, an orc cast out by her people, an unlikely camaraderie burgeons. Determined to slay Utillax to regain status with her clan, Farunda agrees to help Fargus hunt down the hell-drake to redeem himself and shake the empire from his tail. The two are natural enemies, yet their fraught circumstances force them together as reluctant allies. Can they set aside their prejudice to see that they are more alike than not, or are the differences between humans and orcs simply too great? With unlikely allies, heart-wrenching betrayals, and unexpected passion blooming between him and the woman he thought his enemy, Fargus may discover that greatness is forged from more than the blade.

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A. Spencer Popp is a writer, artist, and undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo. He is an avid enjoyer of Antiquity and the Medieval period, which paved the way for his love of fantasy and science fiction, particularly the works of Tolkien and George R.R. Martin. A lover of nature, he enjoys illustrating the many fantastical creatures that populate his fictional world of Vayrinn and has a passion for untamed wilderness. In 2022, he was nominated for the Laurier Stedman Prize for Short Fiction. Gift of the Scarlet Shadow (2025) is his first published work, the first book in his debut literary series Ode to the Wilds.

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A. Spencer Popp