Be careful what you wish for! An eight-hour orgasm? What should be divine becomes an exquisitely agonizing ordeal for Tessia, who makes the ultimate quivering sacrifice to the god called the Blesser; but for Avia, who takes Tessia’s place when she’s unable to live up to her commitment to the god, it’s a revelation as well as an act of devotion. For Sayi, leader of the Confessory, her lot is to accept the erotic penalties due for others’ transgressions and offer them a path to atonement; while Yaeris, whose impulsive decision to participate in the Dance of Sacrifice to the Lady of Arts, faces sensual consequences she couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

Welcome to the City, a post-scarcity society without war or disease, ruled by benevolent AIs who are worshipped through rituals of sex and connection. 

The lives of four women are wrapped intimately around each other, in a complex story of transgression, atonement, forgiveness, and creation.

Allow us to introduce you to the third book in the Passionate Pantheon series of erotic science fiction (or is it science fiction erotica? We seem to have slid from one end of the spectrum to the other!). We’re really excited you’re here! We have so much to share with you! Whether you’re after high-minded smut or low filth, you'll find it in the Hallowed Covenant.

The Hallowed Covenant is a departure from the first two novels we crowdfunded, The Brazen Altar and Divine Burdens. The first book established the makings of a visionary post-scarcity world, a place with no war, want, disease, or death, where benevolent AIs are worshipped as gods through (a lot of) ritualized group sex.

The second novel took some of the themes of the first and inverted them. Rather than Utopia, it’s erotic horror, set in the same world. We asked, if there’s no scarcity and no want, how might things go wrong? Dystopias and utopias are, after all, just two sides of the same coin. What matters is who is doing the calling as you flip. 

With the third novel, The Hallowed Covenant, we went in yet another direction, and we’re particularly proud of this book.

The first two novels set the stage. With this book, we really start to explore: How can a society function with no law, no police, and no hierarchy? When anything you could ever need is available from a Provider whenever you want, how do you find meaning or purpose? What do transgression and atonement look like in a post-scarcity setting?

Structurally and narratively, this is a far more ambitious book. It follows a close group of friends against the backdrop of the Festival of the Lady, a month-long celebration of art and creativity, as they come together and fly apart and their lives change forever. We wanted to use the setting of the City to explore some more ambitious ideas about loss, penance, and atonement—themes you don’t see often in post-scarcity Utopian fiction. And practically never in post-scarcity Utopian scifi erotica (at least, that we know of. If anyone has come across any, we’d be interested in hearing from you!)

We really love this book. We think you will, too.

What a long, strange trip it’s been

When we started this journey, we had no idea where it would go. When the first Passionate Pantheon novel sprung from Eunice’s imagination, we thought it might be a fun, interesting, sexy, but ultimately fairly light, romp through an idealized far-future society where sex is a normal part of everyday life.

We never imagined just how topsy-turvy this journey would be.

Along the way, the earth fell into a pandemic with COVID-19, we started writing novels unconnected to the Passionate Pantheon (no, we can’t reveal those titles yet), and life has become really really strange.

As you know by now, Amazon refused to stock the first book for unspecified content-related reasons (though strangely, they are okay with the second, which has both more sex, and more extreme kinds of sex in it!). Barnes & Noble and other retailers didn’t see a problem, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Hallowed Covenant publishes this October. The third draft of the fourth book, Unyielding Devotion, is finished. We’re in the middle of planning and writing the fifth book (check out the livestream recording of us starting that book, if you weren’t able to join us at the time), and we’re already 48,000 words into the sixth (yes, we started writing the sixth book before the fifth; no, don’t ask, it’s complicated).

As we fell ever deeper down this rabbit hole, we found ourselves starting to ask questions about the post-scarcity societies we were writing: If there are no laws and no law enforcement, how are social conventions enforced? If you live your entire life in a single city of only a few million people, and your life may last six hundred years or more, how do you handle breakups? How are transgressions dealt with? What are these AI gods—what do they look like, and where are they?

As that happened, we found ourselves cutting sex scenes to make room for exploring some of these ideas. (Yeah, we know, that’s not what we expected to happen either. Sometimes you just gotta follow the muse.)

With The Hallowed Covenant, we’ve decided to stop numbering the books. Each is designed to stand alone, rather than being read in order, so we encourage people to read the books that speak to them. If you like the lighter, Utopian books, this one will probably appeal to you. If the dark erotic horror is more your bag, check out Divine Burdens and Unyielding Devotion. You don’t have to read them all.

But shh! Don’t tell our publisher we said that. ;)

What you get

If this is your first introduction to the Passionate Pantheon, welcome! We have special bundles that let you get all three books at a reduced price.

If you’re back for more, this is your chance to get The Hallowed Covenant before publication, at less than retail price.

With The Hallowed Covenant, we will also be making an audiobook available for the first time!

You can get the books in signed paperback, or eBook, or both

You can also get an early advance review copy of the fourth book, Unyielding Devotion, which won’t be available to the general public until October 2023 (and is structurally and narratively even more complex still).

And, of course, there will be other goodies and perks you can pick up along the way too.

We had no idea, when we began this writing journey, that it would bring us here. But we’re glad it did, and we’re inviting you to come along with us. We hope you’ll find this world just as thought-provoking and fascinating as we do. 

Who knows where we’ll end up this time?