Elias Fortier, a human independent trader, steps off his ship the Cinderman onto the neutral station called the Lantern. There, he encounters the Photaris diplomat Vexis being of coherent golden light offering a formal greeting and the aggressive Skarrik, who demands to inspect his cargo. But when Skarrik tries to claim Elias's repair drone swarm as contraband, Elias reveals a far more dangerous asset: the human capacity to bridge divides that alien species consider sacred.

As the Photaris watch with calculating diplomacy and Skarrik's faction bristles with hostility, Elias must navigate a web of ancient feuds, rigid codes of honor, and a looming extinction threat that no single species can face alone. The Ember Pact is a story of how humanity, flawed and fractured, finds unity where others find only division.

They were never the escort. They were the distraction.

Cut off, hunted, and trapped inside a collapsing alien facility, Tess leads her people deeper — through sealed hatches, beneath the ruins, into a chamber that shouldn't exist. What she finds there isn't Sporewind technology. It isn't Free Systems hardware. It's older than either civilization by tens of thousands of years. And it recognizes her.

Buried beneath a world that two alien factions have been fighting over for decades is a vault of human memory — proof that humanity once built something vast enough that its enemies feared it long after it fell. The Sporewind sealed it. The Free Systems never knew it existed. And now a conscript who was told her entire life that she was expendable is the only person standing between that knowledge and the people who want it buried again.

A Fistful of Ghosts is a seven-part HFY science fiction story about survival, hidden history, and what happens when the galaxy discovers the grave was empty.