THE SUNDERED MARCHES are not safe or simple; they're alive.

Revolution is in the air. Not an uprising of liberty alone, but also of industry, finance, agriculture, and society, each change forking into three others like an unending chain of lightning.

The empire demands saltpeter and gold, but takes blood and steel too. The rebellion asks pint-sized pipsqueaks to strap rockets to their back and fly; many never come back. The moon bleeds, the pen is mightier than the pistol, and wandering witches live on leather and lightning.

The soil of Alovis, from the lowest point of Lanva Crater to the peaks of the Meteoras and the Vencht Mountains, is riven with good and evil. What few roots find purchase in the prairie soil drink deep of both; life chases power like a lonely weed turns to sunlight, even if only to see another day's dawn.

What people and empires do for that light, the lies they tell themselves over it, and how the very best and worst of those lies spring up from truths – that is what the Sundered Marches, and every single nation of Alovis, is about. It's the story of every skyship, it shadows bandits, buckaroos, and banshees, and it sings with each note in a cosmofonist's score.

There's a war on, but there's a world still living around it, too. Hold on to your knickers, friends; it's going to be one wild ride.

Fundraising Campaign is Live!

By: Cynthia, on 5 May 2026

Follow us on BackerKit and pledge! Only 30 minutes in and we’re a third of the way to our goal, and make sure to check out the video! (We worked damn hard on it!)

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Let Meteora Meet Mettle

By: Cynthia, on 2 May 2026

Dungeons and Dragons

By: Cynthia, on 19 December 2024

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Knickers — Amidst a Vast Blue Sky

By: Cynthia, on 6 May 2026

Flying made Knickers itchy.

He didn’t mean the undergarment, of course. Whether or not those were itchy was mostly a question of what they were made of, how well they were tailored and cared for. Knickers meant himself: the uniformed half-pint dandy rocketing above the clouds at a hundred and twenty miles per hour on feathered metal wings wider than he was tall.

Knickers – more properly Flight-Lieutenant Nicodemus Justinian Rose, Esquire, although he had been Knickers long before he’d chosen such a lovely polysyllabic name, gotten credentialed, or obtained an officer’s rank – was a rebel aerinyes. That meant that he both flew, and was, a death trap.

Toes wiggled inside of his boots, flicking at pneumatic switches as he kept his legs locked against the wind. There were a lot of dangers to flying this way – birds, weather, and you had to mind the rocket exhaust or it’d burn your feet. But he wouldn’t have survived this long if they bothered him. No, most of that was exciting, especially what the boots did for his thighs. There was no upside to the wind whipping at his flesh until everything was cold, numb and kind of itchy.

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Ffion Byrewythe — Lanva March

By: Cynthia, on 3 May 2026

Mara Bloom — Honest Work

By: Cynthia, on 2 May 2026

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Seasoned,¹ award-winning² author Cynthia Skye has been writing books for 22 years now; Meteora × Mettle will be her sixth completed novel. The Sundered Marches setting began as a lark in mid-2019, with two goals: to create unique, fun characters that everyone can enjoy, and then take them as seriously as possible, and to explore the economic aftereffects of a magical plague that hit a magical republic at the height of its empire.³

In accordance with the prophecy, the Sundered Marches has been developed through a 200,000 word tabletop RPG supplement, a released book, a soundtrack available on YouTube Music, and an unreleased book. M×M is the definitive reimagination of the first book, with the benefit of experience and thought.

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¹ 3 cloves minced garlic; salt and black pepper to taste.
² Most improved in 9th grade band.
³ Cynthia would like to emphasize that she began writing this setting in the summer of 2019, and leaves it as an exercise for the reader to determine if she is prophetic or merely unfortunate.