C M Debell

@cmdebell.bsky.social

She/her. Writer and reader of stories. Fantasy forever. Lymond ❤️. Freelancer by day. SPFBO9 semi-finalist. Free book via my newsletter https://www.andeira.net/newsletter linktr.ee/cmdebell

Front cover of The Siege of Druine by CM Debell and excerpt for Book Quote Wednesday prompt 'decide'.

Alyas slammed his back against the cliff and pinned him there. “A good man just bought your life with his own,” he snarled over the outraged protest. “And you don’t deserve his sacrifice.”
Fear paled the skin around the man’s eyes. Fear and anger. “The Qidan traitor?”
The devastating brightness of the Isyr dagger was at his throat before he could blink. “Say that again.”
The man shot a terrified, pleading look in Esar’s direction, but Esar, who had decided he’d interfered enough for one day and had taken a dislike to this man already, merely crossed his arms and waited to see what would happen.

Collage of front covers of fantasy ebooks in the Stuff With Fantasy Summer Solstice 0.99 sale on 17 July 2026

Front cover of In Midnight's Shadow by CM Debell and extract for Book Quote Wednesday prompt 'change'.

“There were things he wanted. I knew that. I didn’t think he wanted them so much that he would take everything else because he couldn’t have them. But I no longer trust my judgement where Raffa is concerned.”
That surprised her. “What things?”
He didn’t answer, but his eyes slid to the tree from which he had hung the Isyr blades that had been his father’s.
“Would you have given them to him?”
“I would have killed him.” The admission was stark, unadorned. Perhaps the most honest thing he had ever said to her. It was her first glimpse of the hold the blades had on him; it wouldn’t be the last. She had no idea then what it was they did to him, or the strength of will it took to remain himself. She didn’t understand all the ways they had already changed him or the price they would take.
I would have killed him.
If she had known, would she still have let that go unchallenged?

Front cover of The Many Shades of Midnight and short snippet for book quote wednesday prompt 'drive'.

He didn’t reply. He just sat there in silence, one hand unconsciously curled around the hilt of the Isyr sword as though he would dearly love to use it. So that was one thing they shared. She had never understood how he could wear those blades all the time. It had driven her half-mad at first with jealousy. But then she had seen what they had done to him, bit by bit, and knew it was a gesture that carried a heavy cost.

Front cover and quote from In Midnight's Shadow by CM Debell for Book Quote Wednesday.

Ailuin watched the Lankaran come. Alone. Arms held up and out, away from the bright blades that hung at his hips, their hilts catching the first rays of the dawn sun in a blaze of light.
Isyr.
Only one man wore blades of Isyr steel. Even Ailuin, who had never travelled beyond his beloved mountains, knew that. Only one man, and he was dead. Travellers had carried the news from Avarel earlier in the year, just one more snippet of gossip out of Lankara’s great capital, another small tragedy in a world that wrought them on itself as though it did not know how to live without suffering.
Gerrin-Raine Sera was dead. By his own hand, according to rumour. Now his son was here, wearing the blades that had made his father famous the length of Ellasia. And he said he wanted peace.

Front cover and excerpt from The Siege of Druine by CM Debell for Book Quote Wednesday word 'group'.

“Evarius!” The rebel leader looked up at Alyas, who pointed to the carnage by the collapsed toll gate, where the dead and dying lay together in a bloody sprawl of limbs. “Collect your wounded. You have one hour.”
“They won’t,” Aubron muttered as Alyas stalked away. “Look at them.” His tone was scornful, disgusted, but his eyes and hands were busy with his crossbow, because looking at them meant looking at what they had done to them, and no one wanted to do that.
He was wrong. As Keie and the rest of the horsemen waited across the entrance to the pass, small groups of survivors crept forward, searching for friends, for men they had trained with and fought beside, taking the living and sometimes the dead. And when they were done and only the unclaimed dead remained, Esar sent a party to drag the bodies into the pass, where they rolled them into the gorge with a quick prayer to Yholis. It wasn’t ideal, but they couldn’t leave the corpses to rot beneath their walls.
Then he went looking for Alyas.
“Go away, Esar,” his brother said when he found him.

Front cover of The Many Shades of Midnight and quote for Book Quote Wednesday - the word is 'several'.

Esar took a cautious step forward. He looked from the bodies to Alyas. “Are you all right?”
Alyas blinked. Some of the fury faded from his eyes. Some. There was still something not quite right about his expression, and several people in this room were very dead. Not that Esar had a problem with that in general, but five on one was a bit much, even for Alyas.
Alyas took an unsteady step, one sword point pressed into the ground. He looked at the bodies like he was seeing them for the first time. His hand was shaking, which was oddly reassuring. Killing tended to do that to you. Or it should.
“Alyas,” Esar said sharply. When dark eyes snapped to his, he said again, “Are you all right?” Because nothing else about this was.
“Esar.” And then, finally, his face eased. “I knew you would come.” His voice sounded normal, steady.
“You didn’t wait for me though,” Esar observed. “What did they want?”

Quote from In Midnight's Shadow for Book Quote Wednesday: 'morning'.

Esar woke her in the morning with a gentle shake and a mug of hot tea. Alyas was asleep beside her, head pillowed on his bent knees. He didn’t stir as she stretched stiff muscles, nor when she reached out to take the tea and brushed his arm with hers.
Esar looked from her to his brother, still sound asleep, and shook his head. “You do have the magic touch, don’t you? Can I persuade you to stay? Keie thinks you’d be good with a spear.”
“Keie’s wrong.”
Esar grinned. “I don’t know about that. When he wakes, tell him Agazi’s gone to collect your ransom.”
He returned to the fire and Cassana drank the tea, which was too hot and unsweetened, and tried not to disturb the sleeping man by her side. But he roused eventually, woken by the sounds of the camp being dismantled, coming awake with a start, hands reaching on instinct towards the blades by his feet.
Then he turned his head and saw her and his expression changed, morphing from confusion to something close to panic that hurt her heart to watch.

Collage of front covers for books participating in the Indie Book Sale, Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Horror, 11-13 April 2026

A purple and orange sunset over the water at the beach in Miyajima, Japan.

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Front cover of The Many Shades of Midnight.
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Front cover of The Many Shades of Midnight by CM Debell and quote for book quote Wednesday prompt 'blue'

If Alyas had hoped for a relatively private first audience with the king, that hope was dashed as soon as the doors opened. Anyone who could claim the status to be present was crammed into the room, some of them still red in the face and adjusting their elaborate court clothes as though they had run here from whatever they had been doing as soon as they heard he was back. And they watched him with expressions that veered from outright hostility to naked disdain.
But that wasn’t the worst thing. Not by a long way. Worse than their contempt was the woman who sat to the left of the king’s empty throne, her blue court dress studded with Isyrium and her dark hair piled high on her head. Ovisia Galea, king’s advisor and head of the Orleas Syndicate, and a most vengeful-looking enemy.
“Sayora,” Alyas greeted her as if they were merely continuing their last conversation and he did not have the full assembly of Avarel’s court glaring at his back. “How delightful. Are you going to try to arrest me again?”

Quote from The Many Shades of Midnight for #WIPSnips prompt 21 November 'special'

“I must admit, I expected more of you, Your Grace,” the syndie called. “Letting your company die to save yourself.”
Esar used his greater size and weight to block the door. “They know what to do,” he insisted.
“Would they do the same for you I wonder?” mused the voice in the courtyard. And the first Isyrium flask went flying—not towards the wing where the company had been lodged, but towards the captain’s office where they were hiding. Esar heard it smash on the roof above, followed by the thud and whoosh of a fire arrow. “Fuck.”
The captain screamed and scrambled over his desk to claw into Esar. Alyas retained enough sense to snatch the half-finished confession from the desk and tuck it inside his armour as flames started to eat through the roof and the smoke billowed in.
“It looks like we are going to find out, doesn’t it?” the smug voice said, and Esar decided he was going to give that man his special attention when they got out of this.

Quote from In Midnight's Shadow for WIPSnips prompt 19 November 'third'

Alyas was sitting down when Esar returned the trophies he had taken from Corado, which was a good thing, judging by the way his face paled when he counted them and realised there were only four.
“Are you sure?” he asked for the third time.
Esar, who wasn’t at all sure, said, “I had my hands full with you, if you remember. Which you probably don’t. I didn’t see any others. Why?”
The leather cords with their strange pendants were draped across Alyas’s knee, two made of copper and another two of silver. They were carved with designs similar to the painted whorls the Lathai wore on their skin, each one unique. Personal.
“I can look,” he offered. Had he missed one? But if he had, someone would have picked it up by now and they’d never see it again. Alyas could hardly order its return. Matters were too delicate for that to be tolerated. And if Corado still had it, it was too late. Nicor had left with him hours ago.
“Why?” Esar asked again. “Why does it matter so much?” He could understand that Alyas wanted to return them with the bodies, but the torture and death of the prisoners was a far greater obstacle to his hope of salvaging the negotiations than one missing amulet.

Front cover of the Ladybird Horror Classics version of The Hound of the Baskervilles

From cover and quote from In Midnight's Shadow for Book Quote Wednesday prompt 'girl'

“Who’s this?” Esar asked, struggling into a sitting position.
The girl maintained an unfriendly silence. There were bruises on her face and ugly marks at her wrists. It was Alyas who said, “This is Della.”
Esar closed his eyes as the thudding in his head reached a new pitch. He gave up trying to sit. “And what’s a Qidan girl doing here?” There were enough northerners with the company that he could recognise Qidan blood when he saw it, and he didn’t expect to see it in a syndicate cell in Hantara. Whoever this girl was, she didn’t belong here. Neither did they.
Alyas said, “She stole from the wrong people.”
“Lot of that going around,” Esar muttered. “Where are we?”
“A syndicate safehouse, I assume. How’s your head?”
“It hurts. How’s yours?”
“Hurts,” Alyas admitted. “Are you all right?”
“No,” Esar snapped. Because he wasn’t. “Told you this was a trap.” The worst kind of trap, so bad he didn’t even want to think about it.

Front cover of The Many Shades of Midnight and quote for Book Quote Wednesday prompt 'colour'

“We were in Flaeres,” Cantrell said, surprising him again. “Chasing rumours. Did you know Ado has been cut off?”
Brivar shook his head. Ado was far to the northeast, hugging the farthest edges of the vast Qido Empire. It was small, poor, and of little consequence to the rulers of Ellasia since its wealth in Isyrium had dried up a century ago. What it had to do with Flaeres he didn’t know, and he was sure from Cantrell’s tone that he didn’t want to.
Cantrell stared through him. He was talking, Brivar suspected, for much the same reason as Brivar was pacing. “Qido has closed its borders with Ado. Nothing gets in or out. No one knows why, or if they do, no one will say.” He blinked, pressing his knuckles to his eyes. “They came out of nowhere. I have never seen their like. Blue from their heads to their feet, naked. The colour of midnight. There were beasts with them, and it was almost impossible to tell one from the other—which was human and which was not.” He lapsed into silence, his gaze drifting. Then he said, “They went straight for him. I don’t know why. We barely got him out of there. I still have nightmares about it.”

Quote from The Many Shades of Midnight for #WIPSnips prompt 'steel' for 4 November

A yawn overtook him, and he turned to pace back across the cave. His gaze snagged on the paired blades hanging on the wall, the elegant hilts the unmistakable cool blue of Isyr steel. Unable to help himself, Brivar ran his fingers over the cold metal, feeling the legendary silkiness of the steel that never lost its edge. They were weapons fit for a king—rare, priceless treasures. Irreplaceable. It had been impossible to mine pure Isyrium for decades. The rough ore that was mined these days was processed by the syndicates and used to power Ellasia’s burgeoning new industries and the work of its temples, but the purity required for Isyr steel was lost to the past. Wars had been fought over it. Even now, possession of it dictated relations between nations.
Cantrell, looking up, said bitterly, “Beautiful, aren’t they? Worth as much as the whole of Lankara. They were his father’s, a gift from the Emperor of Qido. Much good they did him.”

Quote from The Many Shades of Midnight for #WIPSnips prompt 31 October 'monster'

Dark shapes moved among the dead. There are no monsters here, Corado had said. Well, there were. He was looking at them.
“Yholis, that’s Gregan,” the foreman sobbed. “That’s my brother.”
Esar shot him an appalled look. ‘Gregan’ was on all fours in the carnage, his skin mottling from white to blue to black like the corruption of a wound gone bad, spreading its poison through him, changing him. He had once had a name; now he wouldn’t even recognise it. All around him were other changed things, men, women, children—Yholis have mercy, there were children here—and weaving between them the smaller forms of dogs, rats, and wild creatures from the plains. And everywhere they went, whatever they touched, they left it starting to sicken and die, changing like they had changed.

$Quote from Red Dragon Rising for the #WIPSnips prompt 'total' “I have never,” said Aymer d’Carle with a touch of exasperation, “made any secret of where I stand on this matter. Perhaps if you had listened a little more attentively over the last few years, you would have realised that.” It was too honest. He knew it at once from the way Carwel’s expression shuttered, anger disappearing behind the cool composure that always preceded his most vicious moods. “Oh, I know perfectly well where you stand, dear brother. In opposition to me in all things. Isn’t that so?” Aymer considered his brother-in-law, a man he had once called a friend. A man who, even now, he could appreciate for his decisiveness and quickness of mind. It was a shame that he paired those good qualities with a total disregard for anything save his own interests and a refusal to accept any checks on his power. A refusal that had alienated many of his great lords and seen the whole country suffer under the burden of his frequent wars, not just in Llyn but also in his territories across the sea in Laeros. “Not in all things,” he said. Had he not fought beside Carwel in every one of those wars? Had he not, at his brother-in-law’s request, governed for a time some of those fractious territories and attempted to curb their rebellious nature? Had he not incurred crippling debts in doing so, debts the king had yet to settle? “Just in this.”$