About
About
Noctis Codex
One sigil. Twelve worlds. Every power has a price, and the bill always comes due.
Why this exists
We wrote the books we could never find
We wanted dark fantasy that was honest about cost. Not power that arrives free and gets spent on spectacle, but power that is paid for, in front of you, by someone who has to live with the receipt afterwards. Every time we went looking for it we found the same trade: a magic system with no invoice, a hero who levels up and loses nothing, and a series that stops halfway because the author moved on.
So we built the alternative. Twelve separate worlds, each one a different genre, all of them answering to the same question. What did that actually cost, and who paid it.
The Archive
A father, two sons, and thirty years of what if
It started with anime after school and epic fantasy long after anyone should have been awake.
For Tariq it started earlier than that. The eighties, Akira and Transformers, and a fixation on scale and machinery and worlds that ran on rules. It never wore off. When the boys came along it turned useful. We watched everything in Japanese, subtitled, which meant that if they wanted to know what was happening they had to read it, fast, for twenty minutes at a stretch, week after week. Reading stopped being a school thing. Their English came on because of it, and what began as a way to make homework feel less like homework turned into something else entirely.
Twenty years of Naruto and One Piece, long enough that they stopped being programmes and became a standing appointment. Bleach and Hellsing arrived with the younger one and sharpened the edges. Somewhere in there the happy endings stopped being interesting. We wanted the price paid on the page. Between us that is thirty years of watching and twenty years of writing.
This was before streaming. An episode ended on a cliffhanger and you waited a week, and we were bad at waiting. The credits rolled, the exercise books came out, and we wrote the missing scenes ourselves. Filling the gap, then overrunning it, until what we had invented mattered more to us than what was coming next Saturday.
It carried on in the backs of those exercise books, in worlds we drew years before we were good enough to write them, and in arguments about how a magic system ought to work that ran on well past the point anyone else at the table was still interested.
We never stopped. The drawings became notebooks. The notebooks became files, and the files became a drawer of manuscripts nobody had finished. Somewhere along the way the three of us worked out that between us we had the whole pipeline. Tariq plans the structure and the arcs. Amir edits it and keeps it straight. Adam revises and polishes until the prose earns the idea. Every cover and every piece of art is made in this house too. The only thing left was to actually finish something.
Then we finished thirty-one of them, and started three more.
The three of us
Who does what
There is no staff, no studio, and nobody outsourced. Three people, one kitchen table, and a very long argument about endings.
Plans the structure, the arcs and the shape of a series before a word of it exists, then writes it. Thirty years in business before this, which is probably why every magic system here ends up looking like a ledger. Holds the line on the one rule that governs all the worlds: nothing is free.
Edits every draft and keeps the whole library from contradicting itself. The house look is his too: every cover, every banner, every film. Near-black, one saturated glow, cracked silver serif. If you recognised a Noctis Codex book on a shelf without reading the name, that was him.
Takes the edited draft and revises and polishes it until the prose earns the idea, then proofs it. Runs the uploads, the listings and the platforms. If a chapter title is wrong in two places, he is the reason you never found out.
The promise
How we work
Finished first
No book goes on sale until the last page of its series is written. When you start one, the ending already exists.
Ten days apart
Books arrive roughly every ten days until a series is complete. Then the next world opens.
One name
No pen names, no imprint games. Twelve worlds, one sigil, and the same standard behind all of it.
What you are getting into
Twelve worlds, twelve genres, one obsession
A forensic haematologist reads blood for the dead and finds his own is the key a hundred-year forgery was chasing. A girl climbs a tower of dead gods to save her sister and spends her humanity one floor at a time. An empress builds a throne of bone to hold back a tide that erases the world, paying a bone of her own body for every bone she sets. A butcher swallows a saint and learns every miracle is a bill sent to the poor. Beneath London, a collector of infernal debts discovers the sentence she has served her whole life was never real.
Expect grimdark and gothic horror, forensic procedural and Norse ruin, necromancy, dragons, doors, ledgers and priced miracles. Expect people who win by becoming something they cannot live with. Every world stands alone, so pick any door.
Start anywhere. It is free.
The opening chapters are free to download, no email required. If one takes hold, the rest is on Kindle and free in Kindle Unlimited.
Start Reading Free Browse the Twelve Worlds Join the CodexQuestions, or want to talk about the worlds? info@noctiscodex.com