WHAT IS APIS?

Katherine Ichor pretends every day.

She pretends her uncle’s death didn’t break her. She pretends her parents’ whispers don’t reach her room. She pretends she’s fine.

Then she starts pretending she’s powerful.

A werewolf queen rejected by her fated mate. A cosmic Catalyst hunted by an ancient vampire. A goddess of the void learning to unmake reality.

The fantasies are beautiful.

They’re also consuming her.

When the line between imagination and reality finally snaps, Katherine wakes in a psychiatric ward. The doctors say she’s suffering from psychosis. The cosmic war never happened. The monsters were never real. Her coma invented them all.

Her parents agree.

But Katherine remembers the brakes failing. She remembers her mother researching conservatorship laws. She remembers the inheritance that disappeared into her parents’ hands.

Most of all, she remembers her father’s hands weren’t shaking with grief.

They were shaking with calculation.

As Katherine fights to prove she’s sane, one question refuses to leave her:

What if the person everyone insists I am has always been a lie?

And what if the monsters I invented are real?

A psychological horror novel about gaslighting, control, and the terror of trusting your own mind when everyone else insists you can’t.

Because sometimes the monsters under your bed are imaginary.

The ones tucking you in at night are not.

—

Katherine wakes in a pod as blue fluid drains from her lungs. Above her stretches a cathedral of stolen souls - thousands of floating bodies suspended in phosphorescent tanks, each trapped inside a personalized nightmare.

The Syndicate of the Magpies doesn’t steal gold or secrets.

They steal dreams.

Every fantasy, every terror, every desperate wish is refined into Apis energy, the fuel behind an empire built on human suffering.

The woman who pulls Katherine free calls herself Butter - a pale, pink-eyed warrior with glowing bandages, a prosthetic leg, and a habit of offering gummy worms in the middle of disasters. Exhausted, wounded, and running on spite, she is Katherine’s only chance of escape.

Because Katherine’s suffering was never random.

The werewolf. The vampire. The hospital. The grief.

All of it was designed.

Now the Syndicate wants something back, and they are willing to tear their own world apart to retrieve it.

What is Apis? follows two broken women through a nightmare built from stolen dreams, hunted by enemies who do not obey the normal rules of reality.

Katherine’s mind was never escaping the truth.

It was being prepared for it.

—

Content Warnings: Graphic violence, body horror, psychological trauma, gaslighting, parental abuse, medical trauma, involuntary psychiatric confinement, conservatorship abuse, suicidal ideation, and attempted filicide. Includes themes of regeneration, vivisection, conceptual erasure, and existential dissolution. No sexual violence.