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The Darker Stuggles Within
The Shards of the Conduit follows a man in command of an elite strike team who is forced to improvise his way through a nightmare of a mission.
Malek is skilled but flawed, often on the edge of making the wrong call. How did you approach building a protagonist who is both competent and unstable?
I hate to say it, but from personal experience, and knowing people in my life who held such a dichotomy as well. It’s a skill in itself to remain composed, professional, and competent whether you are a field operative or a mom of 3 juggling small humans at home. The truth is, many of us have these internal struggles. Malek obviously has many, and much darker struggles, but he’s learned over the years that the safest option for him often to keep his head on straight and avoid making mistakes. Struggling in silence is, as I said, unfortunately a survival mechanism while folks depend on you.
Military structure and culture feel very grounded. Did you draw from specific historical or contemporary influences when building the Alliance?
I did, I drew from some modern examples as SotC is very near-future feeling. I learned a lot of friends who served, as well as my own research in how to establish structure and common themes for language.
Can you give us a glimpse inside Book 2 of the Eiden Ascendant series? Where will it take readers?
Without revealing spoilers, Malek and Nikita face new challenges as the consequences of their actions bear down on them. Readers will experience tension, desperation, and grief, while also celebrating new alliances and an epic, jaw-dropping climax. Many of the unanswered questions from Book 1 are resolved, even as new ones emerge, setting the stage for the final installment and a satisfying conclusion to the series.
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Commander Malek Reza leads an elite strike team across the reaches of their world in search of ancient shards—fragments of a long-lost device with the power to create or annihilate entire civilizations. Tasked with retrieving them before a ruthless enemy does, Malek knows the mission is more than a tactical operation. It’s a race against extinction.
But Malek harbors a dangerous secret: anomalous abilities that defy physics and explanation. If the truth surfaces, it could cost him everything, including the fragile unity of his crew… And one of them already knows too much.
Nikita didn’t volunteer for war, but she refuses to be silent in the face of it. Determined to keep her expertise from becoming a weapon, she challenges every decision that edges them closer to catastrophe…even if it means putting herself in Malek’s crosshairs. Her relentless questioning forces Malek to confront the true nature of himself and their mission, forcing them to navigate the treacherous path between duty and morality.
As the team closes in on the shards, the line between savior and perpetrator begins to blur, forcing them all to confront a haunting question: on the planet Eiden, where survival is at stake, what justifies the right of any species to endure—and at what cost?
The Shards of the Conduit
The Shards of the Conduit is a military science fantasy novel that knows exactly how it wants to introduce its world: at a sprint, under pressure, with one soldier dropped into a nightmare and forced to improvise his way through it. The book opens with Malek, call sign Specter, heading into a mission gone horribly wrong, and that opening gives the novel its identity right away. It’s tense, tactile, and deeply invested in how fear feels inside the body. One of the smartest things author Sarah Yusuf does is give Malek a simple recurring line, “Don’t lose your head,” and turn it into a window into his trauma, discipline, and survival instinct. That line tells you a lot about the book as a whole. It’s interested in action, sure, but it’s even more interested in the cost of action.
What makes the novel work for me is that it’s not just built on combat set pieces. It’s built on a volatile political and emotional landscape. The mission starts as a hunt for a Fireborne attacker, but it quickly becomes a story about uneasy alliances, inherited hatred, and the dangerous meaning of the shard everyone wants. Malek begins the book with a hard, almost reflexive view of the Elemnai, shaped by military training and old prejudice, and the story keeps pressing on that worldview. The epigraph, “None of us are free, until all of us are free,” feels less like decoration and more like the book quietly telling you where its heart is. Beneath the firefights and covert ops, this is a story about empire, fear, and whether people raised inside a brutal system can learn to see each other clearly.
The book’s center of gravity is Malek, and Yusuf gives him enough rough edges to keep him interesting. He’s capable, sarcastic, stubborn, and often one bad decision away from disaster, which makes him a good anchor for a story that depends on forward motion. His dynamic with Kei is especially strong because it develops under fire rather than in safety. Their banter never feels like it wandered in from a different book. It feels earned by exhaustion, injury, and necessity.
I also liked how confidently the book commits to scale. It gives you the sense of a much larger world without stopping every few pages to lecture about it. The map, the different Elemnai groups, the Alliance structure, the languages, the shifting borders, and the references to past wars all help Eiden feel inhabited rather than assembled. By the time the novel moves toward its later setup, with Malek being pushed into a new command and a new hunt involving the Earthborne and another shard, the story has already earned that expansion. It feels like the natural next step for a series opener, not a trailer for a different book. The shift into a broader mission works because the first part has already established that every shard carries political consequences, not just mystical ones.
The Shards of the Conduit is a sharp, fast-moving series opener with a strong sense of atmosphere and a clear emotional core. It’s a book about soldiers, but also about memory, identity, and the slow cracking open of inherited certainty. Yusuf writes action with urgency, but the book’s staying power comes from the way it ties that action to character and ideology. By the end, it feels less like one mission completed than a world pried open. I came away thinking that this book’s biggest strength is its conviction. It knows the story it wants to tell, and it tells it with heat, momentum, and enough moral tension to make the next installment feel worth following.
Pages: 313 | ASIN : B0G4XTRRKM
