Scott Marlowe

Introducing the Fantasy Books by Scott Marlowe Podcast

scott@scottmarlowe.com — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 09:14:00 -0700

Fantasy Books by Scott Marlowe is live on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music. Follow the show in whichever app you already use, and a new story lands in your feed every week — unabridged, start to finish, no paywall and no credits to spend.

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What is Fantasy Books by Scott Marlowe?

Sword and sorcery audiobooks where magic and mystical technology meet wondrous, explosive mayhem. Some of the best — and worst — characters from the World of Uhl take their turn: assassins and thieves, knights and witches, sorcerers and worse. New stories weekly, plus the occasional bonus tale.

Every book, story, and tale I've written will eventually hit the feed. Rather than scatter them, I'm running one series at a time so you can start at the beginning of each.

First up: Tales of the Assassin Without a Name

The Assassin Without a Name has built his reputation on discretion, skill, and a blade that never misses its mark. But when a routine contract drags him into a deadly conspiracy, he uncovers a secret war that has raged for centuries between death priests hell-bent on freeing an imprisoned god and a secret society willing to condemn a city to stop them.

When the most unlikely of allies—thieves, scientists, sorcerers, and a master thief who knows him better than anyone—are forced together by desperation, the Nameless Assassin must navigate a treacherous web of shifting alliances and ancient vengeance. With a celestial convergence approaching and the barrier between worlds growing thinner by the day, neutrality is no longer an option—and one assassin's choices will decide whether his city survives the coming darkness.

The series runs episodically. Each story is a standalone, so you can drop in anywhere you like. Listen in order, though, and experience the centuries-old war between Warders and death priests, and the assassin who finds himself in the middle, one episode at a time.

The episodes so far

Episode 1 — The Finest Wine

When a routine kill takes an unexpected turn, the Assassin Without a Name finds himself tempted by something far more intoxicating than bloodshed: a vintage worthy enough to justify breaking the rules. But in a world where reputation is everything, can even the finest wine justify mercy?

Episode 2 — Killing the Dead

A job's a job—until it involves killing a man who's already dead. When the Assassin Without a Name is approached by a priest with a strange offer, he expects the usual backroom politics and hush money. What he gets instead is a contract on a necromancer who's already been burned at the stake—and who's about to rise again. To stop the birth of an undead horror, the Nameless Assassin must brave crypts, cultists, and a resurrection ritual that could plunge the city into darkness.

Episode 3 — Night of Zealotry

What starts as a simple job—kill a man, deliver a scroll, get paid—turns into a chaotic, deadly spiral when the Assassin Without a Name finds himself hunted by zealots, harassed by mercenaries, and entangled in a mystery far darker than he bargained for. With a secret cult, a stolen artifact, and an experimental machine capable of horrors beyond imagination, survival means diving deeper into the shadows than ever before.

More arrive weekly. When the assassin stories have run their course, another series takes the slot — with bonus tales dropped in along the way.

A note on the narration

These episodes use synthesized narration rather than a studio voice actor. That's the trade-off: it's what makes a weekly release schedule possible for a one-man operation, and it means you get the stories now instead of someday. The words are mine, unabridged and unaltered.

How to follow

Open your podcast app, search for Fantasy Books by Scott Marlowe, and hit follow. New episodes then arrive on their own, and you'll never have to remember to come looking.

If you enjoy what you hear, leave a rating. Traveling minstrels used to carry stories from one tavern hearth to the next. These days that job falls to ratings, and they're the single biggest thing that helps a new show find listeners. It helps me keep producing great content week after week, and I really appreciate it.

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See you in Alchester and beyond.

Release Announcement: Tales of the Simmaron Woods

scott@scottmarlowe.com — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:52:00 -0700

Sometimes a series evolves in unexpected ways.

I wrote The Hall of the Wood in 2010. I meant it as book one of a trilogy featuring patroller Jerrick Bur and his odd assortment of companions. They might have adventures within the Simmaron's boundaries, or they might venture beyond it, exploring my world as needed to right wrongs, unravel mysteries, and generally do what characters in my books do. Then other projects — and my day job — got in the way. That next book never happened, and The Hall of the Wood sat in standalone limbo for fifteen years.

Then, last winter, between novels in another series, I wanted to write something different. Winter approached. A winter story seemed fitting, so why not set it in the Simmaron? Better still, why not tie it to the events of The Hall of the Wood? That story became The Midwinter Ward, which picks up four years after the first book.

And this year, I wrote The Druid Stones, which opens shortly after The Hall of the Wood leaves off and slots into place as book two.

Three books, and just like that, a proper trilogy.

Introducing Tales of the Simmaron Woods

The King's Patrollers of the Hall of the Wood have guarded the frontier since before the Fall of the Old Gods, sworn to protect against all threats by an oath of oak and iron. But when the patrollers vanish and the Simmaron Hall stands silent, when the goblins of Greth mass beneath their goblin lord's banner, and when ancient wards begin to fail, the folk of Homewood find themselves alone at the edge of a darkness the forest can no longer hold back.

With ancient magic stirring and darkness spreading through root and hollow, the fate of the Simmaron will rest with those brave or foolish enough to answer the Call of the Woods.

Tales of the Simmaron Woods includes:

Book One — The Hall of the Wood

A call for heroes. A forest in peril. A patroller forced to face his past.

An old friend's plea drags Jerrick Bur, former King's Patroller, back to the Simmaron. The Hall of the Wood has gone silent. Jerrick investigates alongside a cryptic sorcerer, a headstrong knight, and a bard whose songs foretell horrors — and finds something beneath the forest's roots far worse than goblins.

More about The Hall of the Wood →

Book Two — The Druid Stones

A grieving half-dryad. A dead god's power. A priest who wants the world to rot.

The witch is dead and the Well of Darkness stands empty, yet Aliah Starbough walks a dying grove every morning, certain something remains wrong. She's right. The corruption didn't vanish when the witch fell — it changed hands. To end it, Aliah must carry the darkness home to the Cavern of the Well, and a priest five centuries dead intends to stop her.

More about The Druid Stones →

Book Three — The Midwinter Ward

A ghost bound by duty. A shaman fleeing his own kind. A wardkeeper who will sacrifice everything.

On Yuletide Eve, Wardkeeper Elara Millwright stands alone at the Cavern of the Well as the wards protecting it fail. A wounded goblin shaman staggers out of the storm. A long-dead patroller rises. The three of them have until dawn.

More about The Midwinter Ward →

Read them together

The box set collects all three novels in reading order as a single ebook, with an author's note on how this trilogy came to be. Prefer paper, or prefer to be read to? Each book is also available on its own in paperback, hardcover, and audiobook — the individual book pages above list every format and every retailer.

Tales of the Simmaron Woods: Box Set (Books 1-3) →

Each book stands on its own. Read The Midwinter Ward first on a cold night if you like — it was written so you could. But the three of them in order give you the whole arc of what woke beneath the Simmaron and what it cost to put it back.

🎧 Or listen free

All three novels are narrated in full on my YouTube channel, free, no account required. I've gathered them into a single playlist in reading order, so you can start at the beginning of the Simmaron and let it run.

🎧 Listen to the whole trilogy →

If you enjoy them, a like and a subscribe helps me grow my channel and is greatly appreciated.

What's next

Tales of the Simmaron Woods is more than a trilogy. It's a continuing series about the people who live, work, and survive in the Simmaron — patrollers, wardkeepers, and stranger things. As with another series of mine, the one featuring a certain assassin, the possibilities run as far as I care to take them.

If you partake of the trilogy, please leave a rating or a review. For an independent author, a handful of honest reviews does more than any ad I could buy.

The Druid Stones Preview Chapter 1

scott@scottmarlowe.com — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:35:00 -0700

ALIAH CROSSED THE BOUNDARY INTO Sollin-kel a little after dawn. Behind her, the Simmaron Woods in autumn was a dim place, all rust and shadow with the scent of leaves hanging over it. Ahead, the light came softer and from more directions than the sky allowed, and the air carried a sweetness belonging to a flower her mother had once told her about but whose name escaped her.

A week and three days ago, they had defeated the witch, drained the Well of Darkness, and set things right.

But still, something was wrong.

That something remained elusive, so Aliah walked the perimeter of the dryad grove, as she had every day since returning here.

She stopped to watch the stream because a running stream was worth watching. Upstream, outside Sollin-kel, its water was the color of old bark. The witch’s doing, her release of the Well’s power lessening each day but still tainting the Simmaron. But here inside her mother’s grove, the water ran clear, untouched by the rotting effect. The bed’s polished stones lay beneath a glistening stream, and small fish held steady against the lazy current. Below the second bend, where the banks widened, sand lay pale and fine along both shores, combed into ridges by the current.

By almost any measure, all seemed well. But this was Sollin-kel, a dryad grove, and a place of pristine beauty and otherworldly fae energy. The Well’s taint had never reached here. Yet the glade faded all the same.

Her mother’s home had never been a quiet place. The few outsiders allowed here expected cathedral stillness, and found instead a racket—water over stone, wind working the high canopy, insects buzzing, and birds past counting. Before the witch’s act of murder, Sollin-kel had held more birds than any other square mile of the Simmaron, drawn in by safe nesting and the abundance the dryads cultivated for them. At the turn of spring, the dawn chorus often woke sleepers three hundred yards outside the boundary.

Aliah positioned herself in the middle of it and took a tally. A nuthatch worked a trunk somewhere north. Two crows, passing through rather than staying. The stream.

Nothing else.

The air still carried the familiar sweetness, thinner every visit, the way the scent of scattered petals lingered after flowing downstream. Aliah indulged in the scent as she traversed through the western glade to the grove’s heart. The dryads had opened this area generations ago, cutting neither branch nor bough, persuading the canopy apart until moonlight lit the floor, and they had danced in it at the turn of every season long before the Hall of the Wood had existed. Leaf fall lay across it uncleared. Bramble had come in along the southern edge, thorny and thriving how bramble thrives when uncontested. In a year, when the glade closed over and the forest reclaimed it, no one would remember a clearing had ever stood here. Some time after that, despite everything Aliah might do, Sollin-kel would exist as nothing more than a memory. The witch’s taint had taken the grove’s dryads, leaving only Aliah, a half-dryad without the prowess or abilities of the others to make any difference to that outcome.

Acorns lay everywhere underfoot.

For as long as Aliah remembered, her mother and aunts had spent their autumns shaping them—a night’s work over a handful, and by morning one acorn in twenty held something. A small warmth, a knot of green, or a stubbornness potent enough to carry a seedling through a bad winter outside the grove. Her aunts had pressed them on her whenever she left. Those destined to grow and become new trees, she scattered throughout the forest. Others—the truly special ones—she carried for years, using them only when needed.

She had gathered a double handful on her first morning back, sitting with them in her lap until dark, waiting, wishing, for someone to come to shape them once more. No one came.

Eleven oaks stood at the heart of the grove.

She knew them the way another woman recognizes the faces down a long table. The second from the stream had been Sellaya Duskbough’s, her bark smooth and gray and warm on the southern face even in cold weather. The fourth, Talveya Greenmantle’s, forked low and wide and the easiest in the grove to climb, which Talveya had spent two hundred years pretending not to enjoy. The seventh lost its crown to lightning before Aliah was born and grew a new one at an angle, stubborn and lopsided. Ondeya had been stubborn and lopsided herself, so she had appreciated the humor in it.

Two of the eleven had never quickened.

Nine once held dryads.

She visited each, laid both hands flat against the bark, and listened. Eleven different voices gave her the same answer. Not her mother and her ilk, who were no more, but the trees themselves.

The magic fades, but we will remain.

The dryads had died protecting this place, sacrificing themselves for what? Without their influence, the glade was becoming something else. Not something unsavory, but something normal. Someday soon, she expected to find it unrecognizable.

Aliah strode up to the great oak on the eastern rise, the oldest of them. She sat down at its foot with her back against the roots and remained quiet.

Vadeya Dawnoak had blended with that tree centuries ago. The oak was her mother now, in the way that mattered to dryads and in no way at all that mattered to a daughter. Aliah had yet to decide whether sitting here was comfort or cruelty. She did it anyway. Grief was not a thing she relished, though she had discovered she preferred to take it in the open, where the trees could see her do it.

“I went back to the cave,” she said. “The witch’s bones remain. The Well of Darkness is empty. The druid wards are silent.” She paused, waiting for an acknowledgment that was never coming. “The druid’s shade asked me to restore the wards, to give each statue a druid stone. But the stones drank the Well’s evil instead. I know it isn’t what he asked me to do, but the stones dispelled the darkness. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?” Another pause. “The sorcerer took the stones to keep them safe. But you feel it as well as I do, don’t you?” She wasn’t sure if she spoke to the tree or to the memory of her mother. “Something isn’t right.”

Aliah remembered carrying the Gemstones of Morann out of Delbin Kinkaed’s tomb in a pouch at her waist. She had gone down into the Cavern of the Well to give one unto each of the four sentinels and put an end to the whole business. She had climbed three steps before the witch’s trap had taken her mind. When she finally surfaced from the black place Saress had drowned her in, and they’d stopped the witch, the Well stood dry, and the stones had gone drab and lightless.

It was what he told me to do, Holly had said. He said...the Stones...

Nobody had questioned the priest’s motives because they had won.

But the power of a dead god does not stop existing. Delbin had told her as much in the dark of his tomb, in that dry voice that sounded from everywhere and nowhere. The druids had not destroyed the Well for a reason. They contained its power because containment was the only possibility.

Murik had carried the Gemstones of Morann—the druid stones—to the Simmaron Hall, where he packed them alongside the witch’s belongings. He planned to take it all outside the forest, where the denizens of the Simmaron would never have to think about it again.

Aliah rose and touched the bark of her mother’s tree.

“I have to go,” she said. “I do not know for how long. Perhaps I should seek Delbin’s counsel again. Perhaps I need to visit the Hall.”

When it seemed the oak meant to give her nothing, she turned away. But before her hand left the bark, she felt something on her fingertips—not words, nothing so clear. But a pressure, like a sleeper shifting.

She remained motionless, listening.

“The patrollers?” she asked. “You still trust them.”

Aliah waited for more. But that was all.

“I let go of my need for vengeance, and so I will trust them, too.”

She let her fingers slip from the bark, and then she left the grove and headed for the Simmaron Hall.