First look at Casthen Gain by Essa Hansen: read the entire first chapter!

With only a few weeks to go until Casthen Gain by Essa Hansen hits the shelves, it’s time to get a look inside for a bit of a sci-fantasy entree before the main course hits on the 28th of July 2025. I am so excited for this book to hit the shelves–available in ebook, paperback, and hardcover–and I can’t wait to see what our reader community thinks of this non-stop action romp through the most dangerous planet in the solar system.

In Casthen Gain, a wayward culinarian investigates the wrong secret and finds himself dropped on the strangest and most dangerous planet in the multiverse. He’s here alongside murderers, exiles, and adrenaline-seekers to participate in a battle royale race, forced to hunt for an eons-buried mystery or die trying. The prize? Being allowed to live…and join the cruel organization that put them all here, which might just mean the creative freedom Sentace has craved all his life.

1Rough Crowd

Head swaddled in sensory deprivation veils, body in aggressive multi-species restraints, and crammed in a prisoner dropship with… he could smell at least twelve others despite the veil… this wasn’t the worst outcome Sentace Ketch had imagined after being taken captive. He hadn’t been tortured or murdered yet, and he hadn’t found Evi dead before he could fake her death himself.

Upside: he was finally free of his attending “team” whose imbecility had gotten him captured in the first place, and whose oversight had meant he’d have to assassinate Evi for real. Everything would be easier now, alone, if he survived whatever this was.

The ship hit atmosphere. A blast of resistance gripped the vessel. Wailing tones transferred to Sentace’s skull through the restraints, barely dulled by the material of the veils. The rumbling juddered his teeth. His brain hit a panic switch: stomach acid rose to the base of his throat, urgently swallowed before it reached his tongue. Planetary arrivals and departures were yet another new experience for him, coming from a backwater homeworld galaxies away. This re-entry wasn’t helped by the fact that the dropship felt extremely budget, a cacophony of rattles, buzzes, and engine strain.

Eventually the descent evened out and velocity waned. Sentace’s stomach continued to argue. He summoned calm. Endure, be patient. His kitchen had taught him patience: dough rising, stock simmering, meat marinating, egg whites stiffening. A rhythm of action and waiting.

In a swift motion, everyone’s sensory veils were husked off.

The prisoners exploded into reactions as intense as the restraints allowed. Sentace flinched, his extra-keen human senses assaulted by growling and argument and groaning steel and stomps and one creature wailing what was either despair or a war cry. Sentace was familiar with many species—dining patrons, tourists—but the immense diversity in the multiverse beyond his little planet had shown him just how small his life experience truly was.

Some prisoners recognized one another. A gigantic chketin erupted in uncontrollable laughter while barking out the words, “In here with the scum and scraps, eh, Molinar!”

The chketin’s spittle crossed the way to an elderly woman with dark, leathery skin and classical beauty, whose expression remained completely unbothered. Golden jewelry wound her head and neck, and metallic paint sketched expensive flowers around her eyes. High-ranking; someone for whom this capture was a humiliation. Perhaps, in her case, being marked as an expendable utility was the worst possible punishment. All damned, what had Sentace been hurtled into?

Another creature said through a voice box, “Oi, I know you, scrap! Second time caught, eh!” The untranslated language was chemical, wafting into Sentace’s nostrils in a cadence of sour prickles and rot-sweet slides.

Face scrunching, he held his breath and tuned out his fellows’ overreactions. There were fourteen others, a mix of xenids—he’d nearly guessed right. Hybrid organic-mechanical restraints served as passenger cradles, holding everyone upright and immobile on both ship walls. None looked to have been disarmed or disrobed, though the restraints made attack impossible. Sentace noted that his bandolier of seasonings still looped his chest, and he hoped his chef’s vari-knife remained strapped on his thigh.

He tried to catalogue all fourteen potential allies or opponents. A human girl hid behind a curtain of dull blonde hair, her body dewy with drug-sweat, and a glaze of trauma over her fish-pale eyes. The chketin: a species that always looked like charred meat to Sentace, with rough, hairless skin wrapping a thick, muscular frame. Next to a human man with two augmented legs and one hundred percent criminal vibes was a fully mechanical, semi-humanoid exoskeleton with no original body inside. The brain-pan contained a small, squid-like organism that must have been controlling the frame. Beside them was a bipedal xenid, a confusing mass of bone and cartilage.

All in all, the majority of the crowd were humans, though Sentace had come to understand that “human” was an almost uselessly broad term encapsulating such variety it was pointless to attempt to group them properly. Sentace bet his Trowan phenotype was distinct enough to recognize—maybe even by his eyes alone—given how isolated and xenophobic his culture was.

As the most worldly Trowan citizen, and transuniversal specialist, Sentace had convinced the administration to choose him for the assassination job, and gained a rare ticket off-world. Upon leaving his planet’s confines, he’d discovered how laughably limited his knowledge actually was of multiversal economy, immensity, and key factions… such as the vast and infamous Casthen organization who now had his life in their grip. They and their mysterious leader, Çydanza, were applauded by some and despised by others. Their ethics were fluid. With one hand, they enslaved and monopolized and destroyed, and with another, they rehabilitated, cultivated, and reversed extinctions. Sentace scanned for clues about which of those hands had grabbed him.

“Ou, big ‘uy,” said a strange little creature in the cradle beside his. The words squished in their wide, froggy mouth. “You w’ the weird eys. I c’n smell wha’ you’re. The spiiiicies.” Besides a bandit strip of pink skin around their ink-drop eyes, and adorable parabola ears, they were all downy white fur. “I know wha’ comes next. Wanna team up w’ Chiidi? I love t’ eat.”

Before Sentace could respond, the bottom of the ship folded apart to reveal sky beneath everyone’s feet. After hours of sensory deprivation, the view was a door to a dream.

Several prisoners shrieked. Sentace’s calm dropped away with the floor. A flare of acrophobia spun his heart rate higher, and his restraints proved unnecessary as his muscles locked up anyway. It was a newfound fear since there weren’t many heights on his planet and he’d never gone up to its orbital station. That had been the sole job of Evi Omai, their only pilot. If she really had sought asylum with the Casthen, was she now flying dropships like this? More rote routine, enslaved to another institution. He hoped she was sent out on multiversal missions, allowed all the freedom she’d incinerated a world to have.

He forced himself to look down. It wasn’t a view he’d expected, and a low whistle of astonishment passed his lips when his breath returned.

The night side of this planet was skinned entirely in dark megastructure, with emerald and gold pleochroism rippling across the surface. A web of lines and window lights scored it. There were enough Casthen emblems and colors to mark this as the faction’s headquarters; the most closely guarded secret in the entire multiverse, impossible to reach. No wonder he’d been unconscious and veiled for the trip. This was a place that no one who saw could leave and live to tell about it. Lucky him.

The dropship banked, showing a ring of twilight ahead and the dawn of a distant, languid sun. Sentace choked down another urge to hurl.

“Nine crimes,” someone swore, voice pitched high by terror. “Hundreds?”

“We’re meat,” barked the man with augmented legs. “Experiments.”

“Now, now, be agreeable,” said the xenid encased in the brainpan of the mechanical skeleton. A vocal emitter parsed its speech into hollow units. The leggy creature splayed against the glass of its container. “Panic aids none but our captors.”

Nice to know some of this crowd was reasonable. Sentace braved another look down to find out what was terrifying criminals as sordid and bloodthirsty as these. Twilight illuminated the planet’s most surprising feature, one that Sentace’s homeworld shared: the surface was blistered with variously sized bubble universes. Some universes scooped into the planet itself, transforming chunks of it, others hovered over the surface like dewdrops, and many stuck together into foam clusters. More must have been buried or encapsulated by the megastructures and ruins. A few universes were skewered by scaffolding and walkways and tunnels. Others, dangerous, were left well alone.

Every universe—whose sizes here ranged from fist-size to small moons—was a space that differed from others with unique changes in physics, as if stepping into a slightly different version of the world. The rinds that separated universe spaces were energy membranes allowing anything to pass through… though not always safely.

Someone quavered, “What in mercy are those?”

Another chortled at them. “Oh, baby thing, you are in for a treat.”

Sentace’s heart skipped. This planet spelled death for anyone unfamiliar with universe bubbles. His home planet had thousands more universes on and around it than any comparable area of space he had learned of until this moment. This Casthen world had what looked like a hundred times more universes on it than Trow. With access to such a wealth of physical conditions, no wonder the Casthen were the heart of economic production, trade, and research in the multiverse, however profit-driven and immoral. And no wonder this Casthen stronghold’s whereabouts were so sensitive a secret that even a whisper of curiosity voiced at the edge of a galaxy could bring soldiers swarming in, as they’d done to him.

There was clearly more environment than the Casthen could explore or use. Occupied megastructure had dominated the dark side of the planet, while out here in the light, ancient architecture was devoured by jungle and sea, giant mountain ranges, distant hurricanes, and plains of building-tall fungal growth. A morbid fascination bubbled over Sentace’s fears, and even the dizzying height felt surreally interesting. A bird’s view of nature reborn from moldering civilizations.

The crowd’s reactions ranged from awe to dread. At the row’s end, a musical voice sang, “Bringing us out here… must be a research project too gruesome to house with other operations. Rare physics translation tests, or the like.”

Sentace was willing to bet on that. The prisoners hadn’t been killed outright, so they were headed into forced labor or to be used as a material.

“Translation?” said the fluffy white xenid named Chiidi, beside him. They gaped at the view. Poor thing must be unfamiliar with how universes worked.

The ship slowed over a landscape of cratered hills, close enough to make out herds of animals fleeing through orange copses of scrub brush and quartz pillars. Sentace tried to relax his tense muscles before the restraints pinched circulation. Lightheadedness blurred the view. The hopeful part of this predicament was that, for now, he was still on Evi’s trail, since she’d been headed to the Casthen and might be on this same planet’s dark side. Once he sent home proof of her death—the Trowan administration wouldn’t know if it was faked—he’d be liberated from his old government for good and able to disappear and start a new life.

A fully armored Casthen soldier entered from a door at the end of the bay. Their armor was strangely and intimidatingly mismatched, as if they’d torn the best off of everything, and instead of looking ramshackle they looked optimized. A smooth and mostly featureless mask in dark blue drew his eye up in ways he didn’t want.

Sentace inhaled deep to raise his voice and lie that he was with Evi Omai and this was all a misunderstanding, but the crowd began babbling at the same time.

“Shut it,” the soldier called, louder than the rabble. A material in their mask both amplified and deadened their voice.

Half the group quieted down.

“There’s an energy anomaly, out ‘ere, somewhere. We want it tracked.” The soldier held up a finger-length device like a rod of faceted diamond. “You all’ve been given a touchstone. It’ll glow the closer you get, and activates a beacon once completely charged. Set off the beacon and you’ve won. Winner gets to live. Winning’s the only way off this planet.”

Sentace glanced at the canyons passing below, dizzied by his fraying nerves. He breathed as deep as the chest bands allowed.

Winner gets to live.

The crowd rioted with fresh objections, to which the soldier added, “There can be only one winner, so don’t get friendly.”

The elder woman named Molinar hissed, “Asinine. Do you sincerely have no budget to find this anomaly yourself?”

Another, out of sight: “Nah, the anomaly’s a lie. They wanna watch us kill each other.”

More dissent heaped on. Most prisoners assumed they were going to be free-roaming test subjects. Sentace couldn’t argue with that… he wasn’t buying the setup of an anomaly interesting enough to seek out yet so uninteresting they would only use expendable resources to find it. He’d learned that the Casthen valued utility, could be heartless, that their operations often had little oversight from their leader Çydanza, and that they were rumored to engage in all manner of grotesque experimentation, treating bodies as raw substance.

Chiidi next to him stared at the forest below while wringing their tiny, spidery pink fingers. They murmured repeatedly, “My fur canno get wet.”

The poor creature didn’t fit with the rest of this trash. Neither did Sentace—he wasn’t morally gleaming, but Trowan life was so tightly controlled, it had no room for crime. He asked, “How’d you end up here?”

Their ears flared and their fur puffed on end. “Blew it up,” they squeaked happily. “Blew a lot of ’em up.”

A tiny saboteur, this Chiidi. The likes of Evi, able to take radical action. Sentace warmed to them immediately. There was a whiff of smoke in their fur, the scent burned into his memory along with the fiery silhouette of Evi Omai. She stood atop the steps of administration, still wearing a pilot’s neural halo around her head. She’d torn off her Trowan uniform, down to her undergarments, like shedding an old skin. Her hair was tied high in a long tail that reached her thighs, the mandated style for a woman of her age and position. She held it by the end, straight out to the side. A knife gleamed in her other hand as it sawed the tail short. If you’re going to rebel, do it all the way, eh? Wind full of fire sparks caught the liberated strands and whisked them away along with the years of history they contained, the legacy of Trow up in flames.

The dropship pulled down to a lush green lowland. Flocks of birds exploded off patches of berry canes, filling the air with wings.

Chiidi asked in turn, “Wha’s a chef doin’ ‘ere?”

As Sentace opened his mouth to reply, the passenger’s restraints at the head of his row disengaged and the person plummeted out the open belly of the ship. Their scream dopplered as they swept past.

Oh. Oh shit, they were being dropped dropped off.

Sentace shut his eyes but that let the vertigo loose. Everything spun, which was worse, so he gritted his teeth and stared straight down, letting his vision soften into a blear of colorful texture. As gorgeous universe bubbles and clusters passed by, Sentace tried to convince himself this was like home. This was his element. He pushed panic to the bottom of his mind and hushed it under a swell of confidence.

Some distance from the first, a second competitor was released. They flailed, which made their body whip end over end. The fall was a couple hundred meters at least.

One passenger was hooting, psyched up, loving this. Another raced through prayers at the top of their lungs. The skull-containered xenid with the mechanical body plumped a shock-absorbing material throughout its frame. Lucky.

Another release. They were going down the rows in order. Was it better to anticipate his turn, or not?

The next individual to fall was fully armored, but hit the domed membrane of a universe and incinerated while passing through, incompatible with the laws of physics inside.

No. Definitely better not to anticipate. Sentace’s heart jumped, pulse throttling his neck. He unfocused his eyes again and breathed. The unlucky person’s armor scattered to the swamp below. There was going to be a lot of luck involved from here on.

Poor Chiidi was next. They blinked a nictitating membrane over their eyes and trembled. The cradle opened with a snap. Chiidi’s long, skinny arms flared out. Their clawed hands hooked onto Sentace’s boots.

“Hey!” he cried while the xenid flapped beneath him, fur slicked smooth by wind.

Boom. Sentace’s release was detonation. Metal ruptured around his limbs. All sense of the ship ripped away as Sentace entered free fall.

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