Showing posts with label Greek Mythology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greek Mythology. Show all posts

Friday, June 5, 2026

The Shadow and Scepter by Timothy Manley and Shawn McMichael ~ @RABTBookTours #RABTBookTours #TheShadowandScepter #ShawnMcMichael #TimothyManley #Fantasy


The Shadow and Scepter by Timothy Manley and Shawn McMichael


Tales of Méhns Móri, Book 1


Low Fantasy, Greek Mythology & Legend, and Dark Fantasy

Date Published: May 19, 2026



About the Book:

When the gods went to war, they shattered the world.

Kingdoms burned. Ancient powers fell. And in the ruins they left behind, the shadow of Coruk-Azul the one-eyed god of death still lingers.

Hidden among the remnants of that forgotten age lies the Scepter of Selene, a divine relic once capable of maintaining balance between gods and mortals. Now broken into scattered fragments, the scepter has become the center of a brutal race that could reshape the fate of the world.

Endymion, a healer from distant Miletus, never sought glory or war. But after arriving in the Greek colony of Phanagoria at the edge of civilization, he is drawn into a deadly conflict alongside warriors, exiles, and survivors bound together by prophecy, secrets, and survival.

Because something ancient is rising.

Vädumir.

Undying conqueror. Cursed warlord. A tyrant who has outlived kingdoms and buried entire empires beneath blood and ash. For centuries, Vädumir has hunted the fragments of the scepter, and he will destroy anyone standing in his path.

If the relic is restored, balance may return to a dying world.

If it fails, something far worse may awaken beneath the ruins of the gods.

Blending dark fantasy, Greek mythology, celestial magic, vampires, giants, and ancient Black Sea civilizations, The Shadow and Scepter is a fast-paced historical fantasy epic perfect for readers of John Gwynne, Joe Abercrombie, and Jay Kristoff.

 

About the Authors:

Long before they began writing epic fantasy together, Timothy Manley and Shawn McMichael were Navy brats growing up on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. They filled their youth with adventures, imagination, and late nights lost in role-playing and strategy games where heroes, monsters, and distant worlds first took shape. Decades later, that shared love of storytelling became The Shadow and the Scepter, the first novel set in the mythic world of Méhns Móri: a realm forged from ancient history, forgotten legends, and the sweeping traditions of heroic fantasy.


Contact Links:

Website

TikTok profile

Instagram profile

Facebook profile

Author Timothy Goodreads

Author Shawn Goodreads

BookBuzz

 

Shawn McMichael is a storyteller who draws inspiration from history, mythology, and a lifelong hunger for discovery, having traveled to over thirty countries. With degrees in communications and history education and a long career spanning the software and gaming industries, he has spent decades in pursuit of the stories only the past can tell. Shawn lives in Washington State with his wife and family.


Timothy Manley is the author of multiple science fiction and fantasy works, including the Earthborn Saga. A veteran of the software and gaming industries, he brings deep experience in world-building and narrative design to everything he writes. Tim holds a BA in English from San Francisco State University and an MBA from Western Governors University, and lives in Oregon with his wife and two of his five children.

 Purchase Links:

Amazon

B&N


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Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Book Spotlight ~ Nine Levels by Elana Gomel ~ Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Greek Mythology ~ @MirrorWorldPub @ElanaGomel #Fantasy #GreekMythology

 Mirror World Publishing and Sapphyria's Book Promotions present the 1-week virtual book tour for 

Nine Levels by Elana Gomel.


About Nine Levels:

Waking up on the beach in Greece after a midnight party, Cleo, a British-Greek tourist, sees a stranger sitting next to her. The stranger has a giant spider on his forearm.

So begins an incredible odyssey through the nine levels of the mysterious mountain populated by an odd assortment of monsters, demons, and avatars of dead gods. Still grieving the unsolved disappearance of her twin sister Cora, Cleo is thrust into the world whose rules she does not understand and whose inhabitants confound everything she thought she knew about Greek mythology. Confronted by Woven Women, masked huntresses, sentient graffiti, and Mother of Monsters, Cleo has to make sense of it all. And meanwhile, a mysterious Call reverberates in her brain: You have to go up. You have to find your sister.

A story of self-discovery, courage, and breathtaking adventure, Nine Levels is a highly imaginative, innovative, and engrossing retelling of familiar legends with a twist you won’t see coming.

Follow the Book Tour:

https://saphsbookpromotions.blogspot.com/2024/07/book-tour-schedule-nine-levels-by-elana.html


Release Date: July 17, 2024

Purchase Links:

Mirror World Publishing:
Ebook

Paperback

Amazon US

Kindle ebook and Paperback

Meet the Author:


Born in Ukraine and currently residing in California, Elana Gomel is an academic, an award-winning writer, and a professional nomad. She is well-known for her work on speculative fiction and narrative theory, represented by her academic books, which Beyond the Golden Rule, Bloodscripts, and The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy. Twelve years ago she published her first fantasy novel and has never looked back. She is the author of more than a hundred short stories, two collections, several novellas, and seven novels. She writes dark fantasy, dark SF, fairy tales, and hard-to classify dreamlike stories, some of them connected to her roots in the former USSR. Her stories won several awards, and “Mine Seven” was featured in the Best of Horror 13 edited by Ellen Datlow. Her latest fiction publications are the dark fairy tale Nightwood (Silver Award in the Bookfest 2023 competition) and Girl of Light, an alternative history of the USSR with monsters. Many of her stories and novels have mythological and folkloric overtones, inspired by her travels and her academic research. Having lived in several countries including Israel, Italy, the UK, and Hong Kong, she now resides in the magical – and sinister – redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains with her husband.

Amazon Author Profile: https://amzn.to/3z5FHeU


Sign up to be a tour host here: 

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

New Release ~ Nine Levels by Elana Gomel ~ Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Greek Mythology ~ @MirrorWorldPub @ElanaGomel #Excerpt

 Mirror World Publishing and Sapphyria's Book Promotions present the 1-week virtual book tour for 

Nine Levels by Elana Gomel.


About Nine Levels:

Waking up on the beach in Greece after a midnight party, Cleo, a British-Greek tourist, sees a stranger sitting next to her. The stranger has a giant spider on his forearm.

So begins an incredible odyssey through the nine levels of the mysterious mountain populated by an odd assortment of monsters, demons, and avatars of dead gods. Still grieving the unsolved disappearance of her twin sister Cora, Cleo is thrust into the world whose rules she does not understand and whose inhabitants confound everything she thought she knew about Greek mythology. Confronted by Woven Women, masked huntresses, sentient graffiti, and Mother of Monsters, Cleo has to make sense of it all. And meanwhile, a mysterious Call reverberates in her brain: You have to go up. You have to find your sister.

A story of self-discovery, courage, and breathtaking adventure, Nine Levels is a highly imaginative, innovative, and engrossing retelling of familiar legends with a twist you won’t see coming.

Read an Excerpt:

Cleo licked her lips, enjoying the pungent taste of sea salt. The spume flicked her parched skin, peppering it with tiny droplets. Her eyes were filled with a red glow as the sun shone through the closed lids. The warmth was just the right side of heat, thawing out her stiff muscles. Her soaked clothes were slowly drying into a crusty armor.

The bench creaked as somebody heavy sat on the other end. Cleo reluctantly unglued her mascara-caked lashes.

The man was indeed big and heavy, so much so that the promenade bench seemed to tilt toward him, lifting Cleo into the air like a child on a seesaw. He sat with his eyes closed, his broad face turned toward the sun. And there was a large spider on his left arm.

She gulped and scooted away, almost falling off the bench. The man did not move. The spider, as big as Cleo’s fist, did not move either, but its angled legs, haloed with shiny hairs, twitched slightly, showing it was no bizarre decoration or a toy. Its golden head, sunken into its globular body, was peppered with multiple dot-eyes, each swiveling independently of the rest as they focused on Cleo.

She slid off the bench and stood up, her joints creaking and her damp jeans chafing her inner thighs. She rubbed her eyes, disregarding the fact that she was embedding the smears of yesterday’s makeup deeper into her tired skin. She blinked, then looked back. The spider lazily spread out its legs across the man’s tattooed arm. Each leg ended in a small, hooked claw, and its swollen abdomen pulsed with amber highlights.

Okay, so she had been drunk. Okay, so she might have hooked up with a Dutch tourist, which was a mistake – if it had happened. But one thing she was absolutely sure of was that she had not taken any drugs. Her sister’s fate was the best guarantee of clean living. So, she had a pint or two occasionally. So, on this Greek vacation she had overdone the combination of retsina, Moscofilero white wine, and the shockingly sweet liqueur called mastika. But it was a vacation, for Christ’s sake! Wasn’t she entitled to let her hair down a bit? She ran her hand over the stubble on her head which had dried into a collection of scratchy spikes.

She edged away from the bench, refusing to look back at the big man with his eight-legged pet and walked to the parapet separating the promenade from the beach below. The sugary-white sand glistened in the blinding sunlight that stabbed into Cleo’s bruised brain. The indigo wavelets licked at the beach margin scattered with shells. The beach was surprisingly empty: no tourists on tatty towels; no coolers, umbrellas, or kids. And no signs of their impromptu party that started last night when Cleo, Mick, Iris, and a couple of Dutch boys whose names she could not remember had spread their blankets in the balmy Mediterranean night on the shore of Syros.

Had they simply abandoned her and walked back to the hotel? But why? Try as she might, Cleo could not remember anything out of the ordinary except the retsina whose piney taste seemed to take up permanent residence in her parched mouth. And why was she soaked? It felt like sometime in the night she had walked into the Aegean fully clothed. Skinny-dipping was one thing, but swimming in your jeans in the midnight sea? And yet, a vague memory, like a disintegrating dream, nibbled at the edges of her mind with images of inky waves, bathwater-warm, embracing her as she swam toward…what?

Cleo squinted into the glare, expecting to see the tawny silhouettes of the smaller Cycladic islands surrounding Syros, but the blue immensity appeared to be empty. Not quite true – there was some vague vertical protrusion on the horizon, shimmering in the sunlight, but the hangover headache suddenly bore into Cleo’s temples with such brutal intensity that she gasped and folded down onto the pavement. She kept her eyes shut for a moment and then swiveled away from the sea, subconsciously noting that her dark glasses were apparently gone together with her backpack. At least her credit cards were back at the hotel – if she could make it. Without dark glasses, the flaming July sun in Greece would burn out her blue British eyes and shrivel her damp British brain. Was it what was happening to her? Was she hallucinating giant spiders as a result of a sunstroke?


Follow the Book Tour:

https://saphsbookpromotions.blogspot.com/2024/07/book-tour-schedule-nine-levels-by-elana.html


Release Date: July 17, 2024

Purchase Links:

Mirror World Publishing:
Ebook

Paperback

Amazon US

Kindle ebook and Paperback

Meet the Author:


Born in Ukraine and currently residing in California, Elana Gomel is an academic, an award-winning writer, and a professional nomad. She is well-known for her work on speculative fiction and narrative theory, represented by her academic books, which Beyond the Golden Rule, Bloodscripts, and The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy. Twelve years ago she published her first fantasy novel and has never looked back. She is the author of more than a hundred short stories, two collections, several novellas, and seven novels. She writes dark fantasy, dark SF, fairy tales, and hard-to classify dreamlike stories, some of them connected to her roots in the former USSR. Her stories won several awards, and “Mine Seven” was featured in the Best of Horror 13 edited by Ellen Datlow. Her latest fiction publications are the dark fairy tale Nightwood (Silver Award in the Bookfest 2023 competition) and Girl of Light, an alternative history of the USSR with monsters. Many of her stories and novels have mythological and folkloric overtones, inspired by her travels and her academic research. Having lived in several countries including Israel, Italy, the UK, and Hong Kong, she now resides in the magical – and sinister – redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains with her husband.

Amazon Author Profile: https://amzn.to/3z5FHeU


Sign up to be a tour host here: 

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Book Tour Schedule ~ Nine Levels by Elana Gomel ~ Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Greek Mythology ~ @MirrorWorldPub @ElanaGomel

Mirror World Publishing and Sapphyria's Book Promotions present the 1-week virtual book 
tour for Nine Levels by Elana Gomel.


About Nine Levels:

Waking up on the beach in Greece after a midnight party, Cleo, a British-Greek tourist, sees a stranger sitting next to her. The stranger has a giant spider on his forearm.

So begins an incredible odyssey through the nine levels of the mysterious mountain populated by an odd assortment of monsters, demons, and avatars of dead gods. Still grieving the unsolved disappearance of her twin sister Cora, Cleo is thrust into the world whose rules she does not understand and whose inhabitants confound everything she thought she knew about Greek mythology. Confronted by Woven Women, masked huntresses, sentient graffiti, and Mother of Monsters, Cleo has to make sense of it all. And meanwhile, a mysterious Call reverberates in her brain: You have to go up. You have to find your sister.

A story of self-discovery, courage, and breathtaking adventure, Nine Levels is a highly imaginative, innovative, and engrossing retelling of familiar legends with a twist you won’t see coming.


Book Tour Schedule:


Girl with Pen - Spotlight
https://victoriazumbrumsreviews.blogspot.com/2024/07/virtual-book-tour-nine-levels-by-elana.html

Sapphyria's Book Promotions - Exclusive Excerpt


July 22

sapphyrias.book.reviews - Review


Sapphyria

July 23

The Writer's Life - Spotlight

Reviews by Saph - Review

Sapphyria's Books - Spotlight


Monday, June 17, 2024

Cover Reveal ~ Nine Levels by Elana Gomel ~ Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Greek Mythology ~ @MirrorWorldPub @ElanaGomel

Mirror World Publishing and Sapphyria's Book Promotions present the cover reveal for 
Nine Levels by Elana Gomel.

About Nine Levels:

Waking up on the beach in Greece after a midnight party, Cleo, a British-Greek tourist, sees a stranger sitting next to her. The stranger has a giant spider on his forearm.

So begins an incredible odyssey through the nine levels of the mysterious mountain populated by an odd assortment of monsters, demons, and avatars of dead gods. Still grieving the unsolved disappearance of her twin sister Cora, Cleo is thrust into the world whose rules she does not understand and whose inhabitants confound everything she thought she knew about Greek mythology. Confronted by Woven Women, masked huntresses, sentient graffiti, and Mother of Monsters, Cleo has to make sense of it all. And meanwhile, a mysterious Call reverberates in her brain: You have to go up. You have to find your sister.

A story of self-discovery, courage, and breathtaking adventure, Nine Levels is a highly imaginative, innovative, and engrossing retelling of familiar legends with a twist you won’t see coming.


Release Date: July 17, 2024

Meet the Author:


Born in Ukraine and currently residing in California, Elana Gomel is an academic, an award-winning writer, and a professional nomad. She is well-known for her work on speculative fiction and narrative theory, represented by her academic books, which Beyond the Golden Rule, Bloodscripts, and The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy. Twelve years ago she published her first fantasy novel and has never looked back. She is the author of more than a hundred short stories, two collections, several novellas, and seven novels. She writes dark fantasy, dark SF, fairy tales, and hard-to classify dreamlike stories, some of them connected to her roots in the former USSR. Her stories won several awards, and “Mine Seven” was featured in the Best of Horror 13 edited by Ellen Datlow. Her latest fiction publications are the dark fairy tale Nightwood (Silver Award in the Bookfest 2023 competition) and Girl of Light, an alternative history of the USSR with monsters. Many of her stories and novels have mythological and folkloric overtones, inspired by her travels and her academic research. Having lived in several countries including Israel, Italy, the UK, and Hong Kong, she now resides in the magical – and sinister – redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains with her husband.

Amazon Author Profile: https://amzn.to/3z5FHeU