Author's Note
The Heart of Pyrathis began as a list of things that should not work in the same book.
Alien dragons. Volcanic werewolves. Mini-Yoda sages with lightsabers. Immortal space elves. A dying planet that may not be a planet at all. Found family at the center of all of it. Genre stacked on genre, like a child piling toys from different sets without checking whether they belong together.
I made the list as a joke. Then I read the list back and realized I would actually like to read that book. So I wrote it.
The Heart of Pyrathis lives at a deliberate intersection — epic fantasy meets science fantasy meets the specific joy of imagining a story without permission to be one thing. Every element on the list earns its place by the end. The volcanic werewolf and the lightsaber-wielding sage do, in fact, share a scene. They have things to say to each other. The book is what comes out when you stop asking whether the genres belong together and start asking whether the people in the story do.
I wrote this book solo. The drafts were made in collaboration with Claude Opus 4.6, working from architectural prompts I built scene by scene. Every passage was curated and edited by my hand. The cover was generated by Google's Nano Banana Pro to direction.
The percentages do not interest me. The decisions were mine.
The book is rated for general readers but takes itself completely seriously. The found family is real. The grief is real. The volcanic werewolf is also real. All of these things are true at the same time. Nothing is winked at.
If a book has the right to exist by the strength of its own joy in itself, this one has earned that right. Read it the way you would have read it at eleven, on a summer afternoon, without checking your watch.
— FrankX The Heart of Pyrathis 2026-04-25