Aster Brooks Books

Ch. 8: The Clearing

Cass skirted through the forest, keeping to the dark pools of shadow cast by the glowing foliage, every step aided by Stealth. She hadn’t spotted any other monsters, but she didn’t let her guard down all the same.

Ahead, the forest underbrush was thickening again, the trees above thinning. She slowed as passing through the thicker brush was much harder to do silently. Still, she wove her way through until she spotted a narrow trail winding its way forward.

Cass followed it fro...

Ch. 7: Stealth

As Cass strode deeper into the forest, the path widened and the underbrush thinned. Above the canopy thickened, with less and less of the storm-ready skies visible, until the only light was the glowing mosses and lichens. What plants remained at the ground level were few and far between.

Here and there, grew enormous bushes beneath open shafts in the canopy. Each leaf was wider than dinner plates to catch every sliver of dappled light that dripped to the forest floor. Vines were more co...

Ch.6: The Better Part of Valor

In any case, she couldn’t stay here any longer. The sky rumbled with distant thunder, threatening again to pour its contents down on her. The hound might still be on her trail. Who knew what else was out there?

But where should she go?

She could continue following the cliffs, perhaps in the opposite direction than previously. However, there was a good chance she’d stumble past another summoning circle like the ones she or the hound appeared from. And there was a good chance th...

Ch. 5: Skills and Stats

She didn’t know how far away she was when she fell out of the wind again. Far enough that she didn’t hear the hound’s baying anymore. Far enough she no longer smelt its breath on the wind.

She knelt on the ground, shaking. Her back screamed in pain.

She wanted to crumple into a ball in the grass. For oblivion to take her and the pain. To faint and be done with it. But she couldn’t. There was no way to know if she was safe. If it was still chasing her. If she had actually e...

Ch. 4 Gathering Storm

Cass found herself standing in wilderness. In front of her, trees reached into dark, grey skies. The underbrush was dense and twisting, glowing with strange lights. Behind her, shear cliffs stretched in either direction as far as she could see, all red-brown earth and fractured stone.

She stood in the center of a square of quarried stone. A circle of sigils were carved into the stone face. A black liquid oozed from them. It pooled on the stone before dripping up into the air, defying ev...

Ch. 3: Choices

Cass started with the simplest something.

“Accept Avatar,” she said to the window floating before her.

She wanted to save the points for later when she had at least the smallest idea of what was going on.

She was banking on her experience with video games. She expected either they would be saved or the system would give her an error message that the screen couldn’t be closed until all points were distributed. Losing the points when the window closed seemed unlikely. 2023-12-20 22:47:25 +0000 UTC View Post

Ch. 2: Insanity Either Way

Something snapped as her body slipped beneath the inky darkness. One moment she had been on her back, terror and pain racing through every fiber of her being, the next she was standing in an empty nothingness, feeling just as empty.

It felt less like her body had moved and more like gravity had reoriented itself around her.

The pain was gone.

She squatted down and clenched her head in her hands, trying to catch her breath. That was harder than it should have been. Not becaus...

Ch.1: An Unexpected Encounter

Cass rolled over on her cot, again. It was hard and narrow and as difficult to sleep on as it had been the last three nights. Even the deep-seated exhaustion of multiple days of long hikes around the extended campgrounds wasn’t enough for her to pass out into the oblivion of sleep.

Around her, the quiet snores of Kaye and Robin, her siblings, were drowned out by the rush of wind through the valley and around the tent. It shook in the whipping winds, disingenuously threatening to fly o...

Stormborn Sorceress Release!

Hello all!

I’m excited to announce the start of Stormborn Sorceress, a litRPG adventure! Join Cass, a woman pulled out of her depth and transformed into a spirit of storms and aether, on her whirlwind adventure to find her way home.

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Blurb:

Cass did not ask to be Isekai’d. 

She did not mean to turn herself into a spirit of storms and aether. 

She certainly did not want to be chased through magic glowing forests by monsters, especially not w...