Remember me
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Demon Star by Jesse Aragon, a horror-tinged science fantasy novel out from DAW on July 28.
Ysira Naktis was a human sacrifice, marked for death. Unlike the thousands ‘harvested’ each year, though, she did the unthinkable. She survived—and what she brought back with her could change the fate of worlds.
When Ysira’s estranged son is chosen to become the vessel of a god-killing demon, she is faced with a choice: allow him to harness cosmic power at an unspeakable cost, or doom millions to save him. She finds an unlikely ally in Brother Jacen Kheris, once a gifted exorcist, now a guilt-ridden addict, desperate for purpose.
From a demon-haunted canyon to a starbound satellite, they must battle their way through cultists, aliens, and the gods themselves. The truths they unearth are deeper and more sinister than anything they could have imagined.
YsiraThe people of Zivora gave their dead to the desert. They carried corpses through the dust and the cacti, walking as far as they could before nightfall—though never too far, lest the wastes take them as well.
Alone among the city-state’s denizens, Ysira Naktis made this journey not to give, but to retrieve. She stalked along the hard-packed red dirt over meandering, gently hilly terrain. The sun lay low on the horizon. As totality drew near, stubborn, final beads of light winked along the edge of the black disc.
Ysira paused in her tracks to watch, an almost ritual farewell, until only Oe’s soft blue glow remained. The vast ringed planet kept a soothing vigil with the twin moons, tonight both waxing crescents.
Night, during the Harvest season, was the only time Ysira did not feel as though she were being watched.
Long ago, in days lost to living memory when Ysira’s people had freely roamed the desert, this ritual had demanded the dead be cast into the canyon—the sprawling, fathomless divide in the world that gave the Scar its name. Nowadays, no one made it that far. Ysira followed a well-worn path through scrubby vegetation and a labyrinth of bones, taking care not to step on the desiccated remains of men, women, and children. Most were sun-bleached skeletons, stripped of meat and moisture by the Scar and its creatures, but a few had just been carried out today.
The funeral processions had long since departed. When the shadow came to Zivora and no one was promised survival, the city tended to become a mess of drunken revelry, desperate crime, and idiotic spur-of-the-moment commitments. Purchases. Business. Ventures. Weddings. Ysira was more than happy to get away from it all, but one could never be too careful out here. She ran her left thumb over the stump of her little finger. A perpetual reminder of the last time she’d run afoul of a higher power.
Her objective lay beneath a tall yucca plant, hunched like a twisted human figure at prayer. The corpse belonged to a man in his forties. He’d been gone a full day now, limbs stiff, skin bruise-dark where it met the ground. Ysira knelt beside him and pulled supplies from her satchel: a bundle of rags, a jar half-full of Ogden’s special solution, and an assortment of slender knives.
The Demon Star
The Demon Star
Buy this book from:
She cut the man’s shirt off, spreading it to reveal his chest and abdomen. Patches of red, peeling rash covered his skin. Pointlessly, she waved away the flies. She began with a long incision beneath the ribcage. She spread apart skin, fat, and muscle, scooping out clotted fluids, working through the tissue layer by layer.
From its perch on a nearby skull, a tiny owl watched her with enormous amber eyes. It hooted softly, almost reproachful.
After a decade of running errands for Ogden, Ysira knew better than to ask him why. This was not the first time the old healer had paid her to retrieve human remains. Once, he’d had her locate a cave deep in the canyon, to which she still returned every now and then to scrape mold off the rocks. Another time she’d stolen vials of pus, drained from lesions on sick goats in the High Lord’s personal stables.
People liked to whisper about Ogden, saying he was a purveyor of blasphemous knowledge, in league with demons. He never outright denied it. He kept the Church off his scent by sending Ysira to do his dirty work, and she didn’t mind. She’d become rather more comfortable among the dead than the living. Besides, she owed Ogden her life. She located the head of the pancreas above the man’s third kidney and cut the organ free. She noted a fungating mass across its surface and a sulfurous odor that made her stomach roil. Cancer, just as Ogden had predicted.
Ysira’s ears prickled, picking up the crunch of dry yucca sheddings nearby. The owl took flight and flapped noiselessly away.
“Shit,” Ysira muttered. She covered her incision with the man’s shirt flaps, leaving him with as much dignity as she could muster. She dusted off her robes, crammed the jar inside her satchel, and slung her kirikil bone glaive across her back as she crept around the bend.
A man was racing toward Ysira, down the dirt path. She reached for her weapon and he skidded to a stop. The man was young, probably younger than Ysira’s twenty-nine years, dressed in rags and clutching a roughspun sack. Red, blistering burns marred his brown skin. Not a Guardsman after all. She was almost disappointed. A fight would have done wonders for her mood.
She tilted her head at him. “What happened to you?”
No answer. His chest heaved as he regarded her with panic.
Curiosity piqued, she prodded, “What’s in the bag?”
His eyes darted toward it, then back at her. “What’s in yours?”
Fair enough. Likely, he was a scavenger from the Knots. They came out here sometimes, braving the wastes in search of forbidden salvage from the canyon ruins. But something about him—the way he held that sack like a clutch of rattlesnake eggs—unsettled Ysira. Was he afraid of losing it, or afraid of it?
“They’re after me,” he said.
“I have to get home.”
“Who?” Ysira demanded.
He had to pause for breath. “Guard. Not far.”
An understanding passed between them. Ysira seized him by the arm, practically dragging him along her path. Keeping low to the ground, they stole behind a towering one-armed cactus. They slid down a pebbled slope into a burrow half-concealed by shrubs and agave plants—
—to find someone already there.
Excerpted from The Demon Star, copyright © 2026 by Jesse Aragon.
Comments (0)