Steel and Stone: Chasing Wyldfire

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

In a world where beasts have risen beyond their primal origins, civilization thrives, but the wild still lingers beneath the surface.

Detective Rex "Steel" Calder and his partner Duke "Stone" Marlowe walk the thin blue line in Athelun, a city of progress built on ambition and old instincts. But when a new drug known as wyldfire hits the streets, the two detectives are thrust into a case that threatens to consume the city. Worse still, the drug is laced with Aether, the raw spiritual force that connects all living things, twisting it's victims into mindless, violent husks of their former selves.

As Rex and Duke hunt for the source, they uncover whispers of the criminal syndicate responsible, and the ruthless power broker who has embedded themself within the city.

With every step closer to the truth, the corruption within the Athelun Police Department becomes harder to ignore. When the case gets personal, Rex and Duke are forced to confront just how deep the rot goes.

With their families in danger and the city on the brink of a shift of power in the criminal underworld, the two detectives must put aside their differences and face the question of how much they are willing to sacrifice to stop what has been set in motion.

Can they stop the syndicate before it can embed itself into the positions of power and influence that would allow it to freely distribute wyldfire? Or have things moved to far too fast for the detectives to catch up?

Information

Status: Completed
Year: 2025
Author: Wulden

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.5/ 5.0
Followers: 21
Views: 9,511

Chapters(38 total)

Reviews

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Community Reviews(3)

MekanipRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Note: This is not a review swap. (I know the icon will appear next to this review, but we just both happened to read each other's stories.)
This is a great story with a lot of potential. The prose is exceptional. It's tight, clean, flows well, and I hardly found a typo anywhere. Honestly, I'm kind of jealous of how well-written Wulden's narrative is. I could learn a thing or two.
Steel and Stone takes place in a world of anthropomorphic animals. It is part fantasy, part detective action-noir. The story concerns Rex and his partner Duke, , investigators who catch wind of a new drug on the street. It's a nasty one and it turns everybody who consumes it into feral versions of themselves. They are trying to get to the bottom of this and shut the supplier down. That's the gist of the story without getting into spoilers.
Style: The action scenes are incredibly well-written without feeling over-the-top and the chemistry between characters feels believable. (There is a caveat to that which I will explain in a moment.) Wulden does a great job of showing instead of telling, allowing the story to progress along and reveal tidbits of this world at a good pace, delivering the exposition in a very organic way.
Characters and story: I am lumping these two together because IMO, the main drawbacks of this story affects both. I said the characters feel real and they do...for human beings. In a world filled with anthropomorphic animals, I feel like Wulden could explore how this affects their society. And in some ways, he does. But the way the characters act still feel way too human.
On one hand, he does a great job at showing the profound suffering one of the main characters experiences. Rex's family fell apart and he is trying his best to piece it back together. His pain is visceral and his desperation to repair his broken family is very well portrayed. But, it feels like something I've seen before.
As for the plot, it is delivered very well. However, I found that I was able to pred
The Musical MartenRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
Rex Calder is our main protagonist here, as we watch him deal with trying to win back his wife who wants nothing to do with him anymore, as well as criminal activity involving a dangerous substance known as Wildfyre. Both seemingly disparate threads eventually merge into one, and we see themes of forgiveness, self-worth, sacrifice, and resilience show up in these characters' conflicts. The style overall is quite well-polished, though not without the occasional typo or redundancy. The story's second half is a well-crafted onslaught of tension and action, and it's varied enough to avoid feeling like it drags on. Not only did they have to combat the villains, but the setting also threatened them. You don't often see the setting leveraged in that way in published books. We also get a much deeper look into Rex's character starting in the second half compared to the first, so when the action kicks up the stakes, Rex's decisions and motives feel deeper. The ending also gives a well-earned emotional payoff.
My main criticism of the story is the first half. There is a lot of very important set-up here that leads to the merging of the crime and family drama and emotional payoffs, but felt like it took too long to accomplish those things. There're so many minor and side characters we jump around to that Rex's character in the first half feels underexplored. We understand his motives and wants, but there's too little self-reflection on his part that lets the reader deeper into his "inner world" before the first trailer scene. A couple smaller criticisms are that the villains lean a bit too much into "cartoon" territory. They tend to come off theatrical, especially when they have dialogue. They weren't given anywhere near as much development or complexity as the hero, making them feel more like living obstacles than characters.
But again, the second half was so much fun that I can't help but give the story hearty approval. The story felt like it sprang to life with intense focus
UwertaRoyal Road
★★★★ 3.5
Prose/Grammar
all of the mechanical elements of this story are pretty much flawless. I haven’t noticed any grammar problems spelling issues, and the prose flows well. Not too much to say.
Worldbuilding/Exposition
The way that this story has handled pretty much all of its worldbuilding and introduction of character backstories so far has been top-tier. There have been no exposition dumps. The story introduces bits of lore at a good rate, while still allowing time for the reader to digest all the information. Nothing is boring, nothing is overwhelming, and everything is easy to keep track of.
Plot
The plot is still in its infancy when I’m writing this review, so how good it will be remains to be seen. So far, the plot specifically hasn’t really impressed me, but there aren’t any glaring issues yet, either. Quite a bit of it is fairly cliche, but has been executed well. Regarding the central detective storyline, there are some things that were introduced directly which I feel could have used more subtle foreshadowing instead, at least for a while, but it’s also possible that they were introduced this way for a reason and I just haven’t seen where the author is going with that yet.
Characters
The characters have mostly been quite cliche so far. The cliches have been done well, to be fair, but they’re still cliches. The interactions and chemistry between the characters is probably a bit cliche as well, but not in a way that stood out to me while reading over how good those are.
Tone
definitely a bit campy in places (particularly the action), but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The rule of cool has its place.
Edit from later on:
Usually when a new chapter of a story I’m following releases, I’ll get a little serotonin rush and get excited to read it, but the past few times I’ve received a notification for this story, I’ve felt nothing. And I’ve been trying to figure out why that might be, since on paper it seems like I should quite like this story. There are a lot of thi