Redemption’s Scars is now live

Today I’m releasing a complete short story that has been sitting with me for a long time.

Does anyone else get frustrated when redemption stories come too easily? When a character makes the right choice and suddenly everything is fine, with no real consequences for what they’ve done? I love a good redemption story, but redemption isn’t a moment. It’s a process.

That conviction is what led me to write Redemption’s Scars.

This story continues Dedecus’s journey beyond Transcendence, asking what repentance looks like after catastrophic failure, and whether someone who hates himself believes redemption is even possible. In Transcendence, Dedecus makes the decisive choice to repent. But as I sat with that ending, it felt incomplete. Repentance doesn’t erase memory. Forgiveness doesn’t dissolve pain. Justice doesn’t disappear just because someone has changed.

So I knew I needed to take Dedecus to a further and darker place, one that forced him to confront himself and the weight of his actions. A place that demanded answers to two difficult questions: Is redemption truly possible? And is there still justice after repentance?

Redemption’s Scars moves through grief, pursuit, and confrontation, into places beneath the world of Fides where memory, judgment, and power collide. It brings Dedecus face to face not only with those who want him to pay for what he’s done, but with the deeper question of whether mercy is something he is allowed to receive at all.

I chose to release this as a free, self-contained story meant to be read in one or two sittings (about a 35–40 minute read) because it’s a story that needed space to breathe, free from distraction. Writing a full novel in a series comes with necessary expectations and moving pieces. I love the characters of Joshua and Namid, but this story isn’t about them. And while I could have expanded this into a much longer book, that was never the point.

This story was meant to be experienced in a single descent and ascent, a complete arc with the epic fantasy action, intensity, and emotional weight of a novel, concentrated into a much smaller space.

That said, Redemption’s Scars is not the end of The Creativity Stone Series. In the coming months, I’ll be sharing more about Book 3, the epic conclusion to the story of Joshua, Namid, and Dedecus.

But for now, I hope you take the time to read and sit with Redemption’s Scars.

Thank you for reading and walking through this world with me.

Read Redemption’s Scars here:

Redemption's Scars

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