Adult Fantasy · Complete · Currently Querying · Set in Mantanea
After accidentally killing his abusive father, Felkin was sure his life was over. Instead, the guild of assassins he’d beaten to the punch offer him a life of contract killing, dangerous intimacy, and a kindness that he has never learned to trust.
The Story
Felkin Savuille is a young man who has grown up under the thumb of his father, a wealthy and influential man who doesn’t care about the damage he inflicts upon his son. When an argument leads to Felkin discovering that the magical reservoirs inside him are deeper than he thought and end up causing his father’s death, Felkin is convinced that his life is over.
He quickly learns, however, that his father was already a marked man when the incident happened. The Velvet Conclave, a guild of assassins whose name is practically an urban legend, sees an opportunity within Felkin, decides to spring him from the jail he finds himself in, and offers him the chance to join them.
This new life is heady and exciting and incredibly dangerous, but he has his allies. There’s Bartoch, a kind, if severe assassin who has more confidence in Felkin than Felkin has ever had in himself. There’s Alarcoch, the leader of the lodge that Felkin is taken to, a woman who is so commanding that Felkin dares not distrust her when she says that he’d fit in there. And then, most important to Felkin, there is Becquorin: a fellow assassin whose body deprives him of magic, but that’s no reason to pity him, thank you very much. He quickly becomes the best friend and biggest lifeline that Felkin could ask for. And he can’t help but notice that his eyes are… striking.
A Dangerous Kindness follows Felkin as he navigates a confusing, morally dark but exhilarating new existence, cramming more firsts into one year than most 21-year-olds would know what to do with.
At Its Heart
A Dangerous Kindness could have easily been a thrilling romp filled with disguises, magical confrontations, and arguments about whether or not a rapier is a functional weapon for an assassin. And don’t get me wrong, it is that.
But it’s also, more centrally, a look at the types of people who pick assassination for a life. How they cope with the feelings it thrusts upon them, how they relate to their fellows in the industry, and how they learn to live a life surrounded by death. Felkin learns to deal with intimacy and open vulnerability, the difference between being protected and being controlled, and how to accept kindness after twenty years of abuse.
I would hesitate to call this a ‘cosy found family novel about assassins’, but I’ve just written that phrase, so make of that what you will.
Mantanea
The world of Mantanea has been bubbling away in my head for about a decade, being the default home for so many stories that share a magic system, history, and so many worldbuilding elements. Think Baroque and Renaissance aesthetics, Austen-esque social and political dynamics, and a mostly grounded fantasy society repeatedly interrupted by bursts of very high fantasy.
Mantanea is a world that has always had magic. Humans can cast spells, and they’ve always been able to. Little, useful things like summoning magelights and healing cuts, setting fires and warming tea. Then came the Birefringence, which linked Mantanea with what came to be known as the Second Facet—a second world of fairies and mystical creatures that got irrevocably linked to the human world. With this, magic poured into Mantanea and humans became, as a result, far, far better at weaving their grist (the magical essence within all living beings) into more impressive effects.
The Second Facet was not the last. Further Facets became linked to Mantanea, bringing angels and demons, dreamers and oceanic creatures, constructs and sentient ideas. The result is a world that is ever on the precipice of some earth-shaking new discovery or disaster. It has been a very fun world to write in.
Behind the Book
As mentioned above, Mantanea has been in my head for a very long time. Felkin’s story has been there for about that long, too—I knew I wanted a story where a young man gets recruited by a guild of assassins and ends up falling for a loveble rogue-type guy. He didn’t even have a name, and his story was only briefly structured, but I knew that this was one of my Main Stories To Get Out Of My Head.
When Felkin got a name, he also got an appearance. When that happened, his starting position came to light, which informed the inciting incident, which then shaped who Becquorin came to be. From those, everything and everyone else. It was a delightful, romantic discovery process and one of the most fun times I’ve ever had putting pen to paper words to .docx file.
I began properly writing in October 2025. About two months in, I realised that this was the one that was going to become the first novel I actually finished. Four months after that, I wrote ‘The End’. This wasn’t the end of the process, naturally—that’s still ongoing!—but it’s one of my greatest accomplishments, if you were to ask me about such a thing.
Something I adored about the process was seeing how much my background in psychology and experience with disability actually informed the way I write now. It’s far more exciting to me to investigate a character’s passions and emotions, to see how they deal with their limitations, and to learn how they live their lives outside of the plotlines I force them through, compared to a fun action scene or a textdump of a world’s lore. I even found that I learned more about how I view myself through how I wrote the two main lads than I could have ever expected, though that’s a piece for another day.
In short: I wrote this and I am immensely proud of it, and I seriously hope that it’s something that you could read one day, too.
About the Manuscript
A Dangerous Kindness is an adult dark fantasy romance, complete at 102,500 words, currently seeking representation.
Ryan Thompson-Bamsey 