Depthbound

In this world, power is not tamed. It is carried. Echoes are all that remain when great beasts vanish from the world — condensed remnants of instinct, memory, and elemental will. The ruling powers harvest these Echoes, refining them into eggs and granting them only to those deemed “necessary.” To absorb one is to become a Vessel — feared, regulated, and watched closely. The law is absolute: one egg per body. Anything more ends in madness or death. I was never meant to carry even one. Depthbound follows the story of a man who survives an inheritance that should have broken him — and discovers that survival is only the beginning. As the Echo within him awakens, its instincts bleed into his thoughts, his reactions, and his sense of self. Strength comes at a cost: sharpened senses, alien urges, and a creeping question of where the beast ends and he begins. Measured not by rank but by Depth, Vessels are judged by how far they allow their inherited will to surface. Go too deep, and history forgets your name. Go deeper still, and you may become something else entirely. Told in first-person, Depthbound is an epic, serious fantasy with moments of dry, human humour — a story of power, control, and the quiet terror of realising the rules of the world were written to keep certain truths buried. Some boundaries exist to protect us. Others exist to keep us small. And some were never meant to last.

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