Kaelan cover art

Kaelan

Kaelan

By: A. Vincent Dougherty
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About this listen

That was the price of a life: thirty pieces of gold for a farm girl whose world had been reduced to ash and blood.

Kaelan is a gritty, "journalistic" audio drama that follows the rise of a prodigy in a world that values survival over mercy. Sold to the village of Palantine after a brutal raid, Kaelan was never meant to be a simple ward. Raised by the village elder, Elianu, she was forged into an elite scout—a warrior who survives not through magic or destiny, but through cold, calculated observation and the mechanical precision of her "studious eyes."

Now nineteen, Kaelan faces the ultimate test of her training. When an ancient terror known as the Axen Wyrm emerges from the earth, her commander flees and her unit falls. Captured, bound in chains, and left in the dark of a jagged stone cell, Kaelan is alone for the first time since the day her father sold her.

In the silence of the "Underneath," she must map her prison, outthink her captors, and find a way back to the surface. Because if Kaelan doesn't escape, Palantine will be the next to bleed.

Step into a world of heroic realism where every wound has a weight and intelligence is the only weapon that matters.

A. Vincent Dougherty 2026 Art Literary History & Criticism
Episodes
  • Kaelan: Wyrm's Grasp

    Kaelan: Wyrm's Grasp
    Feb 4 2026

    "I am not livestock." After a brutal ambush, Kaelan awakens in the suffocating darkness of a stone pit, bound in iron and stripped of her Palantinian rank. In this hollow of the Axen Wyrm, she is confronted by a weak-voiced captor who claims her imprisonment is merely a test for a new initiate. But Kaelan is no stranger to being traded like property. Drawing on the "righteous fury" of a past defined by betrayal, she must use her "studious eye" to craft an escape from nothing but bone, bronze, and blood. The pit was designed to break her identity; instead, it becomes the forge where a survivor is reborn.
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    23 mins
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