The Concubine's Tomb is a Fantasy Web Serial Novel available here
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Anomus, master architect, has toiled for ten years on a tomb for the Emperor's favourite concubine, Hesia, and looks forward to finally seeing his family again.The Emperor visits, and is very pleased with the tomb... so pleased, in fact, that he doesn't want Anomus to build one that might outshine it, some day.
Betrayed and dying, Anomus bargains with an old God for the chance of retribution... and the God transforms him into a Dungeon Core. The official funeral is in three months - can Anomus arrange a suitably lethal welcome by then?
Released as the novel Tomb: Stone and Blood in 2019.
The Concubine's Tomb contains examples of:
- A Dungeon Is You: The protagonist strikes a deal with an old dark God for the chance for retribution, and is transformed into a Dungeon Core for the tomb.
- Beige Prose: The narrative loses every hint of purple when a ghoul is narrating, since they're much more simplistic than humans and lack imagination.
- Disproportionate Retribution: When Vernith ascended as goddess of the Underworld after murdering her patron and stealing his power, the pantheon let her keep her newfound power yet cursed her whole race to devolve into corpse eaters that cannot stand the sunlight.
- Everyone Has Standards: Anomus is thoroughly disgusted when he learns the ghouls have been reduced to barely sentient for something their leader had committed, and decides to help a pack of them to regain a semblance of civilization.
- Everyone Loves Blondes: Hesia is widely acclaimed as the beauty of her age and has golden blond hair. Even a ghoul is fascinated when he finds her in her ironglass sarcophagus, comparing her tresses to sunlight.
- Fate Worse than Death: The Emperor's plan for Hesia - who is not, in fact, dead.
- Horror Hunger: A ghoul can avoid feeding for a few weeks, but it will take its toll upon their ability to reason until the ghoul has wholly fallen in animalistic frenzy.
- It Can Think: Anomus realizes ghouls are not mere animals when a specimen understands there is something very wrong with the Tomb and later comes back with a tool.
- Jerkass Gods: The Faceless God doesn't care about justice, merely about bloody retribution. And he's one of the nicer deities in the story — since the pantheon cursed the ghouls for Vernith stealing her godhood instead of directly punishing her.
- Our Ghouls Are Creepier: Ghouls are a jackal-like humanoid race who are burned by the sun's light, and who must eat dead human flesh to avoid becoming animalistic. A somewhat more intelligent member of the species is exiled from his tribe, and becomes a tool and partner of Anomus.
- Purple Prose: The narrative is just as flowery and grandiose as befits an epic revenge tale unfolding in the same era when Conan the Cimmerian still lived.
- Shoot the Builder: The Emperor reasons like this.
- Spotting the Thread: The ghoul who first stumbles upon the Tomb understands something is wrong with the place when he looks at the piles of rotting flesh inside but cannot see bones anywhere.
- Token Good Teammate: Amongst the gods, Mother Moon is the only one that refused to curse the ghouls because she genuinely believed they shouldn't pay for their leader's crime — the Faceless God went along just because she's his mother and asked him.
- White Man's Burden: Subverted. Anomus wants to uplift the ghouls into a true civilized race, but he refuses to influence them too much as he wishes for the ghouls to not become a mimic of mankind.
- World's Most Beautiful Woman: Hesia, the Emperor's favorite concubine, is considered as the beauty of her age.
- You Kill It, You Bought It: A way to achieve godhood. Still, it's not without a price — Vernith's entire race was cursed when she murdered her patron and usurped his rule over the Underworld.
