Pym’s Key
Karen Sheard
Type: Beta project
Genre: Fantasy
Word count: 117,027
Warnings: Swearing
Pym’s Key follows an otherworldly Gatekeeper who guards the final gateway in a mysterious game. When curiosity compels it to abandon its post and play the game backwards, it gains the chance to experience life as a mortal being. As Pym searches for the game’s beginning, it experiences the joys, miseries, and mysteries of what it is to be alive.
Pym begins as a nameless, incorporeal Gatekeeper – a shadowy entity charged with guarding the final gate to the “Land of Answers” in a vast game-like realm. When a young player unexpectedly calls the Gatekeeper “Pym,” it sparks the creature’s first experience of choice and self-awareness.
Driven by questions about purpose and identity, Pym strikes a deal with the game’s enigmatic Ruler: roll a die for the chance to experience life as a mortal player. Success brings transformation into human form, but at the cost of the creature’s true identity. Travelling through the realms of the living in a new form, joyful and traumatic adventures in the strange lands beyond change Pym in ways you could never expect.
Karen Sheard is a London-based writer who creates dark fantasy fiction exploring existential and philosophical themes. Her work blends speculative science with fantasy, delving into questions of identity, consciousness, and what it means to be alive. A lifelong reader of speculative and gothic literature, she is drawn to stories that blur the boundary between reality and imagination. When not writing, Karen is active in theatre as a director and dramaturg, experiences that often inform the structure and tone of her fiction. Pym’s Key is her debut novel.
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