I’m Morgan A. Drake — a dark fantasy and speculative fiction author and maritime history researcher. I build worlds from the bottom up: research first, magic second.

My fascination with the sea comes from what it refuses to resolve. It gives life and takes it. It connects distant shores and creates impossible barriers. It holds things in its depths that we will never fully recover.
That tension — between what we can explain and what we can’t, between human ingenuity and forces that don’t care about it — is what my fantasy universe, Dimidium, is built on. And what I keep returning to across everything I write.

Dimidium itself began with the sea, and although the current published work is set in the Dragon’s Spine Mountains, the ocean is where the story is ultimately headed.
The research that shaped the world came from the water. The best fantasy grows from understanding reality first. Every magic system has roots in real physics. Every cultural tradition draws from historical research. The magic feels magical because it’s just left side of believable.

Even though fantasy has my heart, not everything I write involves dragons and crystal matrices.
Fathoms Deep is where I follow maritime history and legend into the places where folklore and physics converge — real mysteries, ghost ships, the thin line between what we can prove and what we choose to believe.
Fluke Print is where I experiment with genre boundaries in fiction: neo-noir, space opera, dark fairy tale subversions, environmental horror.
And Beautifully Dead, co-authored with Joe Gillis, is an epistolary historical horror love story told through Civil War correspondence and modern medical research — a meditation on love, mortality, and whether the heart can survive when the body cannot.

When I’m not writing I’m traveling to new coastlines, painting — funnily enough, never the sea — and reading.

Find more at: Dimidium Tales | Fathoms Deep | Fluke Print | Beautifully Dead