A.B. Calder
A.B. Calder is the pseudonym of an author who has been working on a single story for over fifteen years.
He lives with his family in the Dominican Republic — far from the German-speaking world, but close to the conviction that language and home need not be the same thing. In his daily life he works as a freelance IT consultant, electrical engineer and independent programmer — professions concerned with systems, with connections, with the question of why something works and what happens when it stops.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that his first novel series is about a machine that was meant to hold the world together — and no longer does.
The world of Aeryndor did not begin as a book project. It began as a question: what if the light holding a world together were not divine — but made? And what would happen if someone discovered it had been broken?
From that question came characters. From the characters came chapters. From the chapters came a saga in ten volumes, which began in 2026 with The Awakening of the Fragment.
On writing Aeryndor
Why this story. Why now.
Some stories you begin. This one began me.
I have carried the world of Aeryndor with me for over fifteen years. Not as a finished book, not as a plan — as a question that would not let go. A world in which the sun shatters. A young man who sees things others cannot. A machine beneath the earth that sleeps and waits. And the question that runs through all ten volumes: does anyone have the right to control the light?
For a long time I did not know the answer. I believe that was the reason I kept writing.
There were long pauses. Months, sometimes longer — daily life, work, family. But the story never quite let go of me. Sooner or later I always came back. The writing was not a project. It was a place.
Kael Ardyn — the cartographer who would rather look at the world on paper than live in it — is not a stranger to me. He reminds me of someone the world happens to, who observes, who looks for order in things that have none. It took me a long time to understand that this was my story too.
I originally wrote this series only for myself. That it can now be read is still a thought I am getting used to.
The Chronicles of the Shattered Sun are for everyone who draws maps of places they do not yet know. For everyone who asks questions, even when the answers are uncomfortable. And for everyone who knows that some journeys take fifteen years — and are right all the same.