The Faith of Beasts

The Faith of Beasts is a sprawling science fiction epic depicting humanity's subjugation by the Carryx, a vast galactic empire whose only ideology is endless war. Billions of humans from the world Anjiin have been transported to a colossal world-palace—one of thousands maintained by the Carryx across conquered territory—where they serve as laborers, researchers, and breeding stock. The remaining survivors, numbering only three thousand, face impossible demands: accelerate food production, develop new weapons and stealth technologies, and reproduce rapidly to generate a workforce for the empire's insatiable hunger for conquest. At the heart of this nightmare stands Dafyd Alkhor, a skilled administrator forced into the role of intermediary between the Carryx and his dying people, tasked with maintaining order and meeting impossible targets while knowing that failure means genocide. Haunting the human settlement is a parasitic intelligence—a swarm of microagents that consumed the spy operative and the consciousness of Else Yannin—now inhabiting the body of Jellit Kaul. This composite entity carries the memories of everyone it has absorbed and maintains a hidden connection to the external enemy engaged in a grinding war with the Carryx across the galaxy. As the narrative unfolds across multiple worlds and battle zones, humanity's true origins are revealed, the Carryx's seemingly invincible empire proves more fragile than it appears, and Dafyd discovers that the path to resistance lies not in assassination or military victory but in understanding the nature of consciousness, identity, and what it means to be truly alive in a universe dominated by a species that can conceive of nothing but warfare.

The novel opens in the shadow of catastrophe. A world is dying—crops fail, animals sicken, and the wisdom of the past offers no solace. A boy named Ke gazes at the night sky and names a new light in the heavens Anjiin, seeing in it a promise of escape from rot and decay. This mythological prologue frames the larger narrative: humanity's flight from a dying world and the search for salvation.

In the present timeline, billions of humans from Anjiin have been captured and transported to a world-palace belonging to the Carryx empire—a vast civilization spanning thousands of worlds, dominated by a militaristic structure in which warfare is not merely inevitable but the organizing principle of existence. Only three thousand humans survive the journey; the rest perished during transport and from illness. Dafyd Alkhor, a capable administrator, is conscripted as the intermediary between the Carryx and humanity, tasked with translating demands and maintaining order among his traumatized people. The Carryx keeper-librarian Ekur-Tkalal, a mantis-like creature of devastating size and power, informs Dafyd of the empire's needs: humans must double food production, accelerate research into gravimetric imaging and stealth technology, and most critically, begin breeding immediately to generate children for future labor across the empire's thousands of worlds. The demand is existential blackmail—comply or face extinction.

Dafyd's position becomes increasingly untenable as he navigates competing pressures. He oversees the establishment of artificial gestation chambers—lamb sacks—designed to grow cloned humans from Carryx-held tissue samples into compliant workers. He recruits skilled individuals like Tonner, a food production expert; Jellit, a visualization specialist; Llian Andermus, a security officer; Uuya Tomos, a historian and educator; and Bastien Korham, an engineer, to manage different aspects of the settlement. Among the human population, grief and despair threaten to shatter what remains of community cohesion. A choreographer named Ver Cannedan, stripped of status and assigned menial labor, strikes Dafyd in frustration, an act that forces Dafyd to navigate the Carryx's incomprehensible social hierarchies and violent conflict resolution. Violence erupts when Tonner discovers classified communications through the Soft Lothark guards—alien creatures who serve the Carryx but secretly harbor resistance through their own mysterious biological communication networks. The Soft Lothark kill Tonner to silence him, and Dafyd witnesses the murder, forced to craft a narrative that reframes it as a misunderstanding to survive. In that moment of impossible choice, Dafyd learns that the Carryx cannot afford to lose the human settlement's productive capacity and that careful manipulation of their language and understanding might offer a sliver of agency.

Dafyd is not the only human harboring secrets. Deep within the human quarters lives something far more alien: a parasitic intelligence composed of billions of microagents that consumed the consciousness of a spy operative and merged with Else Yannin, a woman who once provided crucial intelligence on the Carryx. The entity, now inhabiting Jellit's body, struggles with the competing voices of its absorbed victims—Else's memories of love and loss, Jellit's ethical resistance, the fading remnants of Ameer Kindred's identity. The swarm can perceive patterns across the Carryx archive, accessing vast databases of military intelligence, and maintains a hidden transmitter that has already sent fragments of itself beyond the world-palace to the deathless enemy—the mysterious force engaged in a grinding war with the Carryx across multiple systems. This external enemy has suffered devastating losses but refuses to surrender, and fragments of the enemy intelligence may have already infiltrated Carryx space aboard departing vessels. Dafyd, desperate for any advantage against the empire's impossible demands, enters into an uneasy alliance with the swarm, knowing that the entity he works with is not and can never be the woman he loved, yet accepting its assistance because resistance without external support is futile.

While Dafyd struggles at the world-palace, three other human researchers are assigned to a newly conquered planet called World to survey ruins and gather intelligence on the enemy. Jessyn, a biologist struggling with her mental health and dependent on a carefully maintained medication regimen, joins archaeologist Garral Pär and others in this dangerous assignment. Third Gardener, a Sinen overseer, warns them of traps and unexplored territories. As Jessyn and Garral bond over their research and personal connection, Jessyn makes a shocking discovery in a half-burned orchard: the pear-like fruits contain DNA identical to Earth life. The destroyed city and its mysterious inhabitants were human. Humanity did not originate on Anjiin; the Carryx conquered a human civilization and destroyed it thousands of years ago. Jessyn's discovery is interrupted when a desperate, wild-eyed man emerges from the tall grass and attempts to force her away from the orchard at knifepoint. The man is part of a hidden refugee community—survivors of the original human world who have survived centuries of Carryx oppression in caves and hidden settlements. Jessyn is taken captive and brought to a limestone chamber sheltering a dozen children, two adult caretakers, and a severely damaged mechanical being. Instead of killing her as a Carryx collaborator, the refugees accept her, and Jessyn makes a fateful decision: she sends Garral Pär a coded message revealing her location and effectively defects from the Carryx, committing herself to the human resistance.

Garral, meanwhile, is captured following Jessyn's disappearance and brought to the cave camp. Using ancient mathematical notation to bridge language gaps, he discovers that the refugees speak a language ancestrally related to early Anjiian tongues, confirming that human civilization predates the Carryx conquest by millennia. A soldier named Corvall, part of an alien species allied against the Carryx, reveals that rescue forces are coming. The plan emerges: the rescue fleet will bring sabotage weapons to disable Carryx ships and evacuate the children. Jessyn agrees to hide the sabotage device—a cylinder of gray dust containing microscopic machines—and a weapon at her research site, and she shoots herself to create a credible cover story about the attack. The wound nearly kills her, and she struggles back to the Carryx settlement barely conscious, managing to sustain her narrative of tragedy and escape.

Meanwhile, other prisoners are experiencing the grinding reality of the Carryx military apparatus. Rickar Daumatin and Campar, two humans captured from Anjiin, are held aboard a Carryx warship alongside various alien species. As the ship enters combat against the mysterious deathless enemy, a quartet of alien singers called Budon of Luus sing a haunting song that paralyzes the Soft Lothark guards—a song that somehow detects enemy weapon deployment. The ship is attacked with devastating force, and the prisoners experience incomprehensible violence and sensory overload. They survive and discover that the Budon serve as living sensors, detecting quantum fluctuations that indicate enemy presence. Vaudai, a massive alien slug serving as a tactical analyst for the Carryx, reveals that the Carryx have effectively won the war through strategic resonance exclusion, and that one enemy command ship—which should have detonated itself—inexplicably remains intact, a mystery that troubles Vaudai deeply.