Author: Author Simon Phillips

Jackal at the Threshold: A Mythic Fantasy Novella of Anubis, Judgement, and the Drowned Kingdom

/ Author Simon Phillips / Leave a comment

A Dark Fantasy Novella at the Edge of Life and Death

In a landscape shaped by river mud, drifting sand, and forgotten dynasties, Jackal at the Threshold unfolds as a mythic fantasy novella rooted in Egyptian-inspired fantasy and the quiet terror of judgement. This dark fantasy novella follows a thief who crosses a boundary older than kings, only to discover that the gods who guard the dead remain watchful long after temples fall silent.

For readers searching for atmospheric fantasy fiction, short fantasy reads, and Amazon fantasy novellas that carry mythic weight without spectacle, this story stands at the meeting point of ruin and reckoning. It draws from ancient necropolises and jackal-haunted desert winds, yet remains grounded in human frailty: hunger, grief, guilt, and the unbearable cost of choice.

As a British fantasy author working within mythic structures and quiet horror, I have always been drawn to thresholds. Doorways. Riverbanks. The moment before a decision reshapes a life. This Kindle novella lives in that moment and lingers there, asking what remains when gold loses its shine and judgement answers in silence.

The Drowned Kingdom and the Weight of Memory

At the heart of this fantasy novella lies the Drowned Kingdom, an ancient necropolis buried beneath shifting western dunes. Its rulers predate the settled river, its corridors carved with jackals who walk between stars and sand. The tomb does not roar. It waits.

Egyptian-inspired fantasy often leans toward spectacle: plagues, curses, elaborate tomb traps bursting into flame. In Jackal at the Threshold, the horror is colder and more intimate. The air grows still. The pigment on the walls remains untouched by time. Scales hang in perfect balance. The jackal god watches without haste.

The Weighing of the Heart forms the mythic spine of the novella. Yet this weighing concerns more than virtue. It concerns intention. Responsibility. The moment when someone sees the crack in the stone and chooses to hurry anyway.

This is where mythic fantasy becomes personal.

Neris, the central figure, robs tombs because hunger demands it. The river quarter starves while the noble terraces gleam. She descends shafts and clears chambers because coin buys breath for her mother. Such choices feel practical. Necessary. Yet beneath them lie fractures that no silver can mend.

The Drowned Kingdom does not rage at her theft. It does something far more unsettling. It remembers.

Anubis Reimagined: The Jackal at the Boundary

Anubis in this dark fantasy novella is neither tyrant nor saviour. He stands at the threshold, patient and precise, weighing what is carried across his domain. He speaks without spectacle. He offers no absolution. What has been done remains part of the one who has done it.

In many indie fantasy books, gods arrive in thunder and blaze. Here, the jackal god emerges from starlit shimmer and still air. His judgement is measured, his presence quiet and vast. He allows choice. He allows consequence.

This portrayal of Anubis honours the ancient imagery of scales and feather, yet reshapes it into something interior. The weighing becomes a confrontation with memory: a brother sent ahead into a cracking shaft, graves opened in haste, gold lifted from silence. The heart holds all of it.

The result is a mythic fantasy experience that explores divine encounter through restraint rather than spectacle. The god does not shout. The chamber grows colder. The light fades. The boundary tightens. And in that stillness, truth surfaces.

For readers seeking atmospheric fantasy fiction that treats gods as forces of measure rather than miracle, this Kindle novella offers a different path through the myth.

From Tomb Robber to Guide of the Dead

The transformation within this short fantasy read does not hinge on conquest. There is no monster slain, no hoard carried triumphantly into sunlight. Instead, the relic is returned. The sceptre becomes a talisman. The thief becomes a guide.

This shift reframes the entire novella. The necropolis, once a place of plunder, reveals itself as a structure of balance. The jackals carved along the walls do more than threaten. They protect the poor man’s burial as surely as the drowned king’s chamber. The threshold exists for all.

Back in the river quarter, the gift of judgement reshapes Neris’s life. She sees spirit-trails where others see nothing. She speaks river-prayers learned from her grandmother. She eases the hesitant dead toward current and rest.

The world remains narrow. Hunger still lingers. Coin still shapes the day. Yet something has altered. The weight she carries now lifts others rather than burying them.

This is the emotional core of the novella. Mythic fantasy, at its strongest, returns the reader to the human scale. The boundary crossed in desert darkness echoes in a small room by the river. A mark on the chest replaces stolen gold. Service replaces theft.

Jackal at the Threshold: Novella Spotlight

Title: Jackal at the Threshold
Genre: Mythic fantasy novella / Egyptian-inspired dark fantasy
Format: Kindle novella on Amazon
Tone: Atmospheric, restrained, immersive

This Amazon fantasy novella stands alone as a complete story, yet opens the way into a broader mythos of drowned dynasties and watchful gods. It is designed for readers who value short fantasy reads that linger, who prefer atmosphere over haste, and who find meaning in quiet reckoning.

If you are searching for:

  • A fantasy novella rooted in ancient desert imagery
  • A dark fantasy novella centred on judgement rather than battle
  • Indie fantasy books by a British fantasy author exploring myth and threshold
  • Kindle novellas that favour consequence over spectacle

then this story offers a deliberate and immersive experience.

You can find the Kindle edition here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GM9PLM9M

Allow the boundary to open where you choose to cross it.

A Cinematic Glimpse: The Flash-Fiction Threshold

Alongside the novella, a cinematic flash-fiction adaptation is available on YouTube. This short piece acts as a threshold glimpse into the world of the Drowned Kingdom, capturing the atmosphere of desert dusk, carved jackals, and the silent moment before a door yields.

It functions as a fragment. A doorway. A sliver of torchlight against black stone.

For readers who prefer to taste the cadence and mood before stepping fully into the Kindle novella, this flash-fiction video provides that first crossing. It carries the same immersive tone, the same slow gathering of pressure, without revealing the full arc of judgement and transformation.

You can watch the flash-fiction adaptation here:

Consider it the first step into shadow before the chamber opens.

Mythic Fantasy, Indie Spirit, and the Quiet Return of Gods

As part of a growing catalogue of indie fantasy books, Jackal at the Threshold reflects a commitment to mythic structures explored through restraint. These stories move between fantasy novella and quiet horror, between buried histories and layered cities, tracing how ordinary lives intersect with forces older than language.

Living within layered environments where old shrines sit beside neon streets has shaped my sense of story. Thresholds exist everywhere. In a doorway. In a decision. In a single breath held too long.

This dark fantasy novella asks a simple question: what happens when someone crosses a boundary and is allowed to return?

The answer lies less in reward than in responsibility. In the choice to carry balance rather than escape it. In the steady work of guiding what has been unsettled toward rest.

For readers of atmospheric fantasy fiction, Egyptian-inspired fantasy, and Kindle novellas that dwell in silence as much as speech, this story invites you to stand at the edge and listen.

The desert remains wide. The river continues to flow. Somewhere beneath the dunes, stone shifts in the dark and waits.

Step toward the threshold when you are ready.

The Last Deterrence: The Illusion of Distance, Near-Future War, Civilian Proximity, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

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In The Last Deterrence: The Illusion of Distance, the world does not end with sirens or fire. It continues. Kettles boil. Trains run. Radios speak in careful language shaped to sit beside dinner and routine. The disruption arrives through phrasing, updates, and reassurances that feel almost familiar enough to trust.

The novella follows Daniel Mercer, his wife Helen, and their daughter Maya as global escalation begins to press closer to domestic life. Daniel works inside the systems that observe and interpret events unfolding across Eastern Europe. At home, those same events appear only as softened language and revised maps, their edges smoothed to prevent alarm. The distance feels stable at first. That belief carries weight. It shapes how days unfold, how evenings settle, and how much attention feels necessary.

This story focuses on the civilian edge of escalation. It explores how institutions manage uncertainty, how reassurance becomes routine, and how belief in insulation holds until it no longer does. Nothing arrives as a single decisive moment. Change accumulates through continuity. Maps widen by degrees too small to argue with. Language moves forward without announcing itself as movement.

Alongside the novella, a series of flash-fiction scenes and cinematic micro-moments exist as extensions of the same world. These fragments are not summaries or trailers. They are lifted instants from inside the narrative: a pause at a study door, a radio speaking steadily, a screen adjusting itself without comment. Each piece functions as a threshold, offering a way into the larger story without resolving it.

The flash-fiction exists to mirror how escalation enters the lives of the characters themselves. Indirectly. Quietly. Through moments that feel ordinary until they no longer hold. When experienced alongside the novella, these scenes reinforce the sense that the story continues even when the page turns away.

The Illusion of Distance belongs to a broader near-future speculative war sequence concerned with civilian proximity to power, institutional hesitation, and the slow erosion of certainty. It avoids spectacle in favour of process. It remains grounded in domestic spaces where decisions made elsewhere arrive through language long before consequence becomes visible.

The full novella is available here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GKXBDKVB

Readers drawn to near-future war fiction, political speculative fiction, civilian perspectives on conflict, and restrained narrative tension will find this story unfolds through accumulation rather than shock. The distance feels real. That belief shapes everything that follows.

The Last Deterrence: The Illusion of Distance is near-future speculative fiction about escalation, reassurance, and the moment belief fails.

When a System Clears Something Twice

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There are moments when failure announces itself loudly. Alarms sound. Lights change. Authority moves in response to visible threat.

Then there are the other moments.

The ones that pass inspection.

Harbinger Protocol was built around those quieter failures. The ones logged, approved, signed off, and archived without protest. The incidents that make sense on paper and leave a faint pressure in the room once the report ends.

The flash-fiction fragments I have been releasing recently come from that space. They are not scenes in the conventional sense. They are residues. Procedural echoes. Things overheard through systems that were never designed to listen for consequence.

One of those fragments centres on a compartment that received clearance twice.

No alarm followed the first authorisation.
No escalation followed the second.
Every reading remained stable.

The repetition carried no technical significance. That is what unsettled it.

Clearance systems exist to remove hesitation. They translate judgement into colour states, timestamps, and confirmation loops. Once permission is granted, the system proceeds without interpretation. That design works well in stable environments. It functions less cleanly when the environment begins to change in ways the system cannot name.

In Harbinger Protocol, those changes arrive early and quietly.

The flash-fiction videos released on YouTube present these moments as isolated artefacts. A log entry. A procedural pause. A line written down and accepted because nothing else contradicted it. They are intended to feel incomplete, as though part of the context remains elsewhere.

That context lives in the short story.

📘 Harbinger Protocol: available on Amazon Kindle
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GJPHF7FH

The book expands the same approach across a wider frame. Institutions responding through habit. Authorities interpreting anomalies through existing language. Witnesses revising statements under pressure until they align with what the system expects to hear.

Nothing in the story announces itself as extraordinary. The horror develops through repetition, delay, and misinterpretation. By the time recognition arrives, the paperwork already carries multiple signatures.

The YouTube video linked below functions as a recovered fragment from that larger record. It stands on its own, although it gains weight when placed alongside the written report.

▶ Watch the flash-fiction video

I have chosen to release these fragments alongside the book for a specific reason. The Harbinger Protocol project relies on atmosphere and accumulation. Each piece adds pressure without resolving it. The videos create a sense of institutional proximity. The book carries the full procedural arc.

Neither replaces the other. They occupy adjacent layers.

This approach reflects the world of the story itself. Systems communicate through partial records. Decisions pass through multiple hands. Meaning emerges through overlap, delay, and repetition. The audience assembles understanding in the same way the characters do.

Slowly.
Indirectly.
After the moment when intervention might have mattered.

If you are drawn to restrained science fiction, procedural horror, and narratives that unfold through systems instead of spectacle, Harbinger Protocol was written for that space. The fragments will continue to appear. The records remain open.

Some files clear once.
Some clear twice.
The difference arrives later.

The Room That Remembered | The Hali Files

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Some rooms empty when people leave.
Others keep count.

The fragment shared this week came from a file marked closed twice and revisited once more than anyone expected. A room beneath older stone. A ritual performed late enough to feel procedural. A witness whose account shifted under review. A space cleansed again after the paperwork had already settled.

The video version of this fragment now sits on the channel as a longform narration. It carries only what the record allows. No answers. No framing. Just the shape of what remained once the room finished holding what it took.

This piece forms part of The Hali Files, an ongoing cycle of short stories and fragments set after the Hali Event. Each entry stands alone while contributing to a wider accumulation of sealed incidents, clerical suppression, and places that refuse erasure. These stories arrive as recovered material: reports, testimonies, annotations, and quiet reconstructions.

The full short-story connected to this fragment is available now as an ebook. It expands the incident through official language, witness pressure, and institutional closure. It offers context without comfort.

Read the full short-story here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GFXLMSNT

The video adaptation exists alongside the text. Some readers arrive through sound and image. Others prefer the page. Both approaches lead into the same archive.

More fragments will follow. Each one leaves residue. Each one brings the system closer to admitting what continues beneath it.

Inside Ashfall Station: A Sci-Fi Noir Short Story

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Sector Twelve reopened before anyone asked the wrong questions.

Ashfall Station is built to remain in motion. Repairs conclude with quiet efficiency. Reports settle into their proper categories. Broadcasts arrive on schedule and carry the right tone of reassurance.
Incidents close.

The Ashfall Files is a science fiction noir short-story series set within that system, following investigations that begin after procedure has already declared the matter finished. Each case centres on a moment that should have ended cleanly, yet lingers, misaligned, resisting the shape imposed upon it.

The first case, The Dead Girl in Sector Twelve, opens inside a corridor already marked resolved. The lighting has been replaced with a newer, steadier glow. The walls have been sealed, their seams still warm from rushed work. The station has moved on. Only a handful of details remain slightly out of place, enough to draw the attention of those whose role is to notice what others are trained to accept.

Alongside the published short story, a series of short-form flash fiction pieces and narrated fragments have been released. These are not excerpts, nor summaries. They exist as atmospheric echoes, fragments of pressure and omission designed to sit beside the main story rather than explain it. They offer an entry point for readers who prefer to listen first, to absorb tone, to decide whether to step further inside Ashfall Station.

If the corridor feels wrong, that sensation is deliberate.

A narrated visual fragment from The Ashfall Files is available to watch on YouTube, presenting the atmosphere of Sector Twelve as it reopens, before the investigation begins.
Those who prefer to encounter the world through sound and image may wish to start there.

📖 The full short story is available on Amazon:
👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GFXLMSNT

A dedicated series page for Ashfall Files is now live, gathering related stories, video fragments, and updates as the cycle expands.

Ashfall Station continues to function.
The record continues alongside it.

The First Walkers and the Earliest Age of the Elder Realms

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Some stories begin with crowns, borders, and conflict already in motion. Others reach further back, to a time when the world itself had not yet learned how to answer those who lived upon it.

The First Walkers belongs to that earlier age.

This short story emerged during a period of stepping away from the main novel, The Veil of Kings and Gods, in order to explore the ground beneath it. Before returning fully to kings, councils, and divine fracture, there was a need to listen to the first layer of the world. An age shaped by memory, firelight, and watching presences, where meaning travelled through instinct rather than record.

The Elder Realms, in their earliest form, are quiet places. Humanity moves cautiously through landscapes that feel aware yet unreadable. The gods observe from distance and height, bound by their own silences. Magic exists as potential, sensed through alignment and response instead of mastery.

The First Walkers is written as a fragment from this age. It stands as a complete short story, while also serving as a foundation stone for what comes later. Ideas seeded here carry forward into later ages, where they take on clearer shapes through belief, power, and consequence.

Alongside the short story, I have been sharing brief mythic fragments drawn from the same period. These appear as narrated pieces and flash-fiction, shaped to feel like recovered scripture or ancestral memory. They offer atmosphere and tone, allowing the world to be approached slowly, without explanation pressing ahead of experience.

One such fragment can be experienced below. It reflects the mood and substance of The First Walkers, presenting a single moment from the earliest age, shaped for listening.

Watch the narrated mythic fragment here:

These fragments act as quiet entry points. Some readers may encounter the world first through sound and image, others through the written story. Both paths lead toward the same long memory.

The complete short story, The First Walkers, is available as a Kindle ebook for those who wish to read the full piece and remain with the world for longer:

📖 https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B0GDWMMQ4P

Further stories and fragments from the Elder Realms will follow over time, each exploring a different age in the long descent toward kingdoms, faith, and fracture.

When Writing Becomes More Than a Hobby

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You know what I’ve realised lately?

Writing, not just novels but short stories, flash fiction, even blog posts, has become more enjoyable to me than watching TV. More than movies. Sometimes, even more than reading.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love a good story in any form. But there’s something different about sitting down with a blank page. Something alive. It’s not passive, it’s creation. Every sentence, every scene, is something I get to build. To breathe life into.

It’s strange, isn’t it? We spend so much of our lives consuming stories, but when you start creating them, time shifts. You stop watching from the outside and begin shaping the inside, the heartbeat of the world you’re building.

And it’s not just about finishing something. It’s about the act itself, the quiet joy of shaping a world from nothing, of following a character you didn’t plan to meet, of reaching a line and thinking, Ah. That one was honest.

Writing has become my pause in the noise, a place where time disappears, yet I feel more present than anywhere else. It’s where I find myself again.

So I wonder, does anyone else feel this? Has writing ever felt more fulfilling than bingeing a series? More grounding than scrolling through a feed?

If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Because for me, writing isn’t just a pastime anymore. It’s where life slows down just enough for meaning to take shape.

Watch the video here: Why Writing Feels Better Than Watching TV | Life as an Author

Why I’m Writing Fantasy Short Stories (And How They Expand My Novel’s World)

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Before my epic fantasy novel The Veil of Kings and Gods releases, I wanted to open a small window into the world of Ældorra, a world of stone kingdoms, fading gods, and myths that refuse to die.

Each short story I write is its own world in miniature. They don’t rely on the main novel, yet every one of them echoes it, a fragment of history, a lost prayer, or a legend that shaped the lands my characters now walk. Some are quiet and personal; others burn with the power of the divine. Together, they breathe life into Ældorra in a way that maps and lore pages never could.

Writing these stories is more than worldbuilding, it’s a way of feeling the world I’ve spent years creating. When I step into a new tale, I discover the texture of the world again: the smell of rain on stone, the flicker of temple light, the forgotten names carved into the ruins.

These short stories aren’t just for readers waiting for the novel, they’re for anyone who loves myth, emotion, and the quiet moments that make a fantasy world feel alive.

You’ll soon be able to explore them as ebooks, see the artwork behind them, and even collect the prints.

Welcome to Ældorra. The gods don’t stay silent forever.

🎥 Watch the video

Painting the Banner of Bremyra

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There’s something special about taking an idea from the page and bringing it into the real world. For me, drawing and painting scenes and symbols from my story, The Veil of Kings and Gods, isn’t just an extra step, it’s part of how I connect with the world I’m building.

The act of painting slows everything down. My hands work while my mind wanders the streets of Castellum, hears the sea breaking against the cliffs, and feels the weight of a thousand years of history pressing through the colours. It’s not just art for the sake of art, it’s a doorway into the heart of the kingdom.

Painting is a passion I’ve carried for as long as I can remember, and it has a way of anchoring me in the work. Every brushstroke feels like a moment spent inside the world itself. I intend to keep creating more pieces like this, not only banners, but places, faces, and artefacts, anything that helps me see the story as clearly as I can feel it.

A Brief History of Bremyra

What does a crimson banner with a golden griffon really mean?

This isn’t just paint on parchment, it’s the symbol of Bremyra, a southern kingdom carved between sea cliffs and old stone keeps. They never conquered, they endured. While other kingdoms fell to war and magic, Bremyra held fast, ruled by kings remembered in silence, not in song.

The golden griffon stands for honour held through fire, and the blood-red field. It’s not for war, it’s for the ancestors who built it with bare hands. Every banner has a story, and this one? It’s only the beginning of mine.

🎥 Watch the time-lapse video here:

The Quiet Victory of Persistence in Creativity

/ Author Simon Phillips / Leave a comment

A short moment from the life of an author.

There’s a quiet kind of victory that never shows up in stats or milestones. It doesn’t come with applause, a viral short, or a nicely rounded word count. It just arrives with a sigh, a stretch of the fingers, and a whispered, “Alright then… carry on.”

Today was one of those days.

I stared at the draft. Again. I knew what needed rewriting, but every sentence felt heavier than it should. The edits weren’t flowing, the coffee wasn’t helping, and the background noise of daily life, bills, work, sleep I didn’t get, was louder than usual.

And yet… I didn’t close the document. I didn’t shelve the idea. I didn’t let the doubt win.

I wrote a sentence. Then another. Then reworded the first one and deleted the second but stayed with it. And that, strangely enough, felt like something.

I didn’t give up.

Not for the first time. Not for the last. But this was today’s win, and I think it’s one worth sharing.

If you’re working on something creative, whether it’s a novel, a painting, a video, or just the courage to start, know this: continuing is often the bravest thing we do.

So if today you didn’t give up either… I’m glad you’re still here.

Let’s keep going.

Simon