About
Prae Obscura is an independent literary horror novelist creating cognitohazards and words-as-weapons. His works discuss the nature of suffering under exploitive systems and social classifications. Each of his projects invite you to examine prescriptivism, respectability, dehumanization, madness, plurality, and consensus reality, using the frameworks of surreal settings, old magic, and cassette futurism.
Prae does not abide the use of large language models, nor text-to-image models, due to their current use in opposition of workers' rights. His work is made by hand, and always will be.
Books
Crepuscular Angles
Released: May 01, 2023
A scholar who cannot read and priest in exile climb to the roof of a dying world in search of their names. The megastructure that was once their home, and their prison, lies in a state of ruin that is overshadowed only by its enormity. Crepuscular Angles follows two perspectives, spanning six periods in time, in a dead world gripped by corporate control, biopunk organ tech, fungal rot, and cassette tape futurism.
The Keys once served as a living host of donor organs, bred from the large reptiles below the City and engineered for human compatibility. Their existence has been one of cages, scalpels, degradation, secrecy, and the pursuit of freedom bought by blood. With a visibly nonhuman appearance, their ability to interact with the City is limited. Freeing their brethren requires assistance from someone able to negotiate a method of Descent from the City to the surface world Below: someone who is visibly human.
The Lantern is a priest. His life has been spent in pursuit of the sole sanctioned religion, Direction, until a disastrous break from reality nurses the seeds of doubt implanted by his childhood studies. In him, The Keys finds an unwilling accomplice, driven by his fear of his impending return to the surface world.
One was born without a name. One has been struck nameless. Both are relegated to sub-human status by the system of second-skin identification through which the City's population is managed. Both seek a better existence, and must rely on each other in order to obtain it. The heat is suffocating, the sea is rising, and the Singing Rot creeps up through the Pillars that support the City. Haunted by the past blending into the present and the bleeding of their personal subjective realities, their only possible route is forward.
Perfect for fans of Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, The Story of B, and Pathologic, this novel explores the structure of human as an assigned social classification, living with psychosis, and escape.
Praise for Crepuscular Angles:
When a piece of art forces you to have opinions about it this way, I have no choice but to say that it's won. [Crepuscular Angles is] a deeply interesting exploration of how the systems we build exploit the most vulnerable of us. — Verse Atoui
Short Stories
The Smell of Flowers
Released: July 11, 2025
The Smell of Flowers by Prae Obscura is a 1,320 word short story that was created for the 2025 Hot Wet Queer Summer Jam.
It depicts a small group of followers who travel across regional lines in search of the dead. It is about bodily dysphoria, and visions, and recreating yourself, and baggage from the past. It is also about being stranded at a motel in the middle of the summer.
Discusses death, gore, and abstract dysphoria. Cannibalism is implied.
Zines
reConlanging
Released: November 16, 2025
A short zine discussing reconstructive conlanging in relation to alterhumanity/nonhumanity. It covers a bit of my own attempt at this moreso than the general premise.
The idea for this was originally sparked by Fifth Wheel Press's submission call for Alterhuman/Multispecies articles. I weighed it, then decided to make a personal zine instead, for a number of reasons. So you are free to look at more of my grammar indulgences.
Introversal
Released: November 08, 2025
A short zine discussing plurality, twinners, introvects, cosmological models, and coincidences. My contribution to the push for more alterhuman personal essays that discuss concepts relevant to us.
Created as prerequisite reading for reConlanging.
Learn Persian NOW
Released: September 29, 2025
This zine was created to entice you into learning the Persian language. Persian is spoken by more than 130 million people. (For comparison, about 85 million speak Italian.) It is present in three standard dialects - Western Persian, Eastern Persian (or Dari), and Tajik - as well as many more that are nonstandard. This zine focuses on the Iranian dialect, Western Persian.
Every single English-based textbook I have read about this language has irritated me. Learning materials from English to Persian, overall, are scarce compared to other languages of its size.
That is my excuse for making this, though I don't need one.
Be khane-ye man biya-yid, zanmard.
You should learn Persian.
Games
Tēafres Burh - The Painted City
Released: June 29, 2025
Version 0.5 - Demo Release. Full text. No art assets.
The Painted City of Tēafres Burh lies far from shore, on a pillar of rock. Tēafres Burh is newly discovered, in the true sense of the word. It has only been extant for three decades.
Isséyka is a Seeker. One who hunts for a means of entering the city, to investigate its wish granting properties. Isséyka is intersex. They cannot produce cortisol. They are a victim of infant genital mutilation.
They have come in search of what is rightfully theirs.
Tēafres Burh - The Painted City covers topics such as infant genital mutilation, death, body horror, intramuscular injections, and obsession. Suicidal urges are mentioned.
Contact
Prae Obscura is represented by Weirlight Press.
For questions, queries, interviews, press materials, or review copies, please reach out to Weirlight Press via email at weirlightpress@protonmail.com.
If you would like to follow Prae Obscura on social media, his accounts are the following:
- Tumblr: @praeObscura
- Itch.io: praeobscura.itch.io
- Bluesky: @praeobscura.bsky.social
- Medium: Prae Obscura
- Ream: Prae Obscura
- BookBub ARCs: Prae Obscura