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Safehouse Recipes: Smoke-Tea & Ash Bread

The market teaches patience. Tea first, plans second. We brew Smoke-Tea when the air has too much memory in it: pine tips for sharpness, charred lemon rind for the scorch, river mint to cool the mouth enough to talk. Ash Bread is for travel—starter folded into scrapings, ember salt pinched like a blessing. Knead in short turns so the table doesn’t thump; silence carries farther than footsteps. Score the loaf with a single feather mark so even in a...

Redacted Brief 001: The Night the Academy Fell

LDC Dispatch // Clearance: Feather. Fires breached the north stacks at 02:14. Ink crawled the eastern colonnade, not reading the stone so much as remembering it. Seven couriers crossed the lantern bridge—two elders between them, one ledger wrapped in wet canvas. We left the statues facing east so the watchers would think we’d run that way. We didn’t. We dropped into the culvert and came up through the spice stalls, ash in our hair and names on...

What it’s about (no spoilers)

A final decree has made written language illegal. Libraries are leveled. Digital speech is filtered in real time. Amid the ruins of a mountain academy, Kaia Mori—once a student, now an unwilling leader—joins the Literary Defense Corps to protect the last mythic archive hidden in the Northern Mountains.

As the regime’s memory-rewriting device nears deployment, Kaia must rally a fractured alliance—rebels, hackers, deserters, and scholars—before history itself is...

Time travel doesn’t just bend history in The Portal Walker Series—it bends the space between a brother and sister. Jake and Emma Parker aren’t merely co-protagonists; they’re a feedback loop. Each jump refracts their bond through new pressures—guilt, protection, and the slippery question of who they are when yesterday can be revised and tomorrow might erase them.

The first oath: “We go together”

Their bond begins with a rule disguised as banter. He builds the portal; she buckles it to real...

In many time travel stories, the past is portrayed as something to be endured—brutal, backward, and waiting to be corrected by a modern protagonist with tech in hand and logic in mind. But in Jake the Time Jumper, I wanted to flip that narrative. What if the past wasn’t just a stepping stone toward progress? What if it held truths, resilience, and knowledge modern minds have long since forgotten?

When Jake arrives in the ancient world, disoriented and clutching his jury-rigged coding rig, he...

There’s a unique thrill in taking a well-known historical era—say, Ancient Greece—and bending it through the lens of speculative fiction. In Jake the Time Jumper, I wanted more than an educational time-travel detour. I wanted to crack open the marble shell of the past and find strange new light inside.

But fictionalizing history isn’t just about swapping togas for time portals. It’s about reimagining what could have been if something—someone—had arrived too soon, or too late.

Take Ancient...

In speculative fiction, it’s not enough for technology to be cool—it has to feel real. In Jake the Time Jumper, “The Bridge” is more than a glowing box that opens rifts in time. It’s a portable coding rig, a handmade fusion of quantum logic and scavenged components. Believability starts with intention.

When building tech like The Bridge, I started with real-world concepts: quantum tunneling, particle coherence, signal interference. From there, I asked: what if a teenager with a knack for...

Speculative fiction lets us build wild, wondrous worlds—but no matter how strange the setting, teen characters should still feel real. In Jake the Time Jumper, Jake may be navigating ancient ruins and glitching time rifts, but he’s still a 15-year-old grappling with fear, guilt, and impossible choices.

So how do you write authentic teens in surreal landscapes?

Start with voice. Teens filter everything—danger, awe, even grief—through humor, sarcasm, or stubborn defiance. Let their dialogue...

“When the sands of time run dry, and the shadows of the past rise anew…”

Long before the rise of Ethos City, when the world still remembered the gods by name, the divine weavers Anansi, Horus, Ekwensu, and Set foretold of a mortal whose destiny would shake the balance of creation. That prophecy—the one buried beneath ruins and encrypted in ancient code—speaks of a Chosen One, marked not only by bloodline but by loss and legacy.

Kellan Morrison, the central figure in Divinity Bloodlines, may...

Time travel often dazzles us with its promise of adventure—leaping through portals, bending history, touching futures not yet written. But beneath the spectacle lies a cost rarely measured in sci-fi: the emotional toll.

In Jake the Time Jumper, the rift between timelines isn’t just physical—it’s psychological. Jake, a teenager caught between eras, carries the weight of a world that no longer knows him. Each jump leaves scars: memories that blur at the edges, relationships that crumble under...

"Alright, let me take you back a bit—to when I was around eight years old. It was just Dad and me by then, living in Ethos City, and he was always busy with his research. But every now and then, he’d carve out a day just for us. One of my favorite memories comes from one of those days.

It was a rare, clear morning in the city, and Dad decided we needed a break from the house and the lab. He took me to the Ethos Sky Gardens—a massive park suspended between skyscrapers, full of lush greenery and...

"The idea of Dad suddenly dying... it’s like imagining the ground disappearing beneath me. He’s always been my constant, the one person who has kept me tethered amidst all the chaos. If I lost him, I would feel like a part of me was gone, too.

But knowing Dad—his suspicions, the way he always seemed to be bracing for something—his death wouldn’t feel like an accident. I would start questioning everything. Who would want him gone? Why now, just as I’m on the brink of something bigger with my...