They came to harvest a world. They found a people willing to bleed for it.
Beneath a sky wrapped in rings, humanity has arrived on a world it believes is waiting to be claimed.
It is not.
Nymira is one of the Eldruhn, a people whose antlers connect them biologically to Water, Fire, Earth, Air, Lightning, and Life. Their civilization has survived by treating the world around them as something to inherit, not consume.
Raven Calder is part of the human colony sent to secure the resources needed for survival. She has been told the native creatures are wildlife.
Then the harvesting begins.
When an Eldruhn is taken apart for study, Nymira’s grief turns toward rage, and Raven begins questioning the reports she has been taught to trust. Meanwhile, beneath the ocean, the Ceralis—an ancient civilization of distributed minds and living coral cities—begin to notice that something is changing above them.
Three civilizations are approaching the same truth from different directions:
Humanity did not discover an empty frontier.
It arrived in someone else’s home.
The World Beneath the Rings: The First Wound is an ecological science-fantasy novel about first contact, survival, identity, exploitation, and what happens when one civilization mistakes another for a resource.
