A girl with long, dark hair and blue highlights in ankle-deep water and surrounded by ghostly figures, a haunting rendition of the Catenarian Chronicles.

Catenarian Chronicles woos dark, edgy readers

ByTC Marti

The Catenarian Chronicles doesn’t follow sanitized genre tropes for readers who want an escape. I’ve built this series to trap readers.

If you want to read the same dark paranormal fantasy you finished twenty minutes ago but with a different protagonist, then get the hell off my site. The Catenarian Chronicles is too tough for you.

You’re getting dark paranormal fiction fused with dark academia, but there’s no woke ideology. Just fringe genre tropes that throw the formulaic approach most authors swear by out the window.

Here’s a litmus test for ya. If you’re:

  • A reader who rejects mainstream YA tropes and wants brutal consequences and complex morality

  • A libertarian-minded fantasy buff who craves philosophical coherence and plot twists

  • An emotionally mature reader who can handle raw trauma, gray morality, and no clean resolutions

👉 Then kick things off with Cursed Mage

Catenarian Chronicles goes further than rejecting the mainstream

Know what else I do? I genre hop from book to book. Cursed Mage and Astray Mage might be dark paranormal fantasies at their cores, but Astray Mage packs a harder dystopian punch.

Hell, if you read Astray Mage and love it enough to reach the end, you’re gonna know two things.

  1. That the old martyr gives even less of a damn about genre fiction than you thought
  2. And that Book III, Rising Mage, is gonna be at least a paranormal political thriller

I don’t care if you’re easily triggered

If you can’t read content that sensitivity readers haven’t watered down first, then don’t read my books. After I had AI hand me a litmus test score for Astray Mage, it spat out who this book wasn’t for:

  • Fans of sanitized heroism

  • Readers who need trigger warnings for bullying, state violence, or drowning imagery

  • Readers expecting traditional Hogwarts/Chosen One arcs

For those trigger warnings, you can add:

  • Hazing
  • Malicious assault
  • Youngsters locked in solitary confinement
  • Images of mangled, charred human remains
  • Intense medical procedures without patient consent

Yeah, Astray Mage gets twisted. It’s not grimdark, but you’d better go in with a backbone if you plan on reading it.

👉 Start with Cursed Mage THEN scale up to Astray Mage

Cursed Mage will test you, Astray Mage will break you

Astray Mage, a dark paranormal fantasy by TC MartiInterested in taking the test? We’ll see how you handle Cursed Mage. Our protagonist, Kaija Jokiharju, is easing into her powers. Powers she’d rather live without but she knows she’s stuck with them.

Because of that, she’s left trying to solve a mystery of why a drowned ghost can’t relive how he died. And what Kaija finds is more diabolical than she could’ve imagined.

If you can handle revelations that are so disturbing that Kaija’s spirit friend can’t speak of them without blinking out for days or even weeks, then once again, congratulations. You’re worthy enough.

So grab that copy of Cursed Mage through The Rebel Lore Vault, see if you can handle it, then brace yourself for the hard stuff.

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