This series is impossible to classify; genre elements mingle in mythical and gleefully subversive ways. The story’s protagonist, Maika Halfwolf, is descended from an ancient immortal called the Queen of Wolves — quite literally an anthropomorphic wolf. Maika has only one arm, though sometimes she wears a magical clockwork prosthetic; hidden in the stump is a squiggly, many-eyed monstrosity that periodically pops out and eats people. Her companions include a talking cat and a child with a fox tail. Yet the obvious parallels with our own world give this wildly imaginative fantasy epic its greatest impact. The central conflict is between “arcanic” people like Maika and humans who have developed a means of extracting magical power from arcanic bodies — brutally, and fatally. This of course evokes the politicized bodies of our own society, more so because so many of the story’s characters are visibly people of color. The war’s proponents deploy propaganda with all the loathsome rhetoric of the white supremacist alt-right; the war’s atrocities are Mengelean in scope and grotesquerie. That the true monsters here include the hatemongers, and not just the tentacled horrors running about, is never in question.

Yet between Liu’s lyricism and the utter breathtaking beauty of Takeda’s art, it’s tempting not to care about the story at all. It’s a pleasant bonus, then, that Volume Two provides answers to some of the crucial questions driving this in medias res story, and some welcome character development for both Maika and her resident monster. New mysteries appear as well, so readers can look forward to the continuation of this macabre, masterly series.

In a realm of myth, magic and burgeoning science, a set of twins is born to the ruler of the land. To tell their stories, J.Y. Yang has cleverly written a pair of twinned novellas, THE RED THREADS OF FORTUNE and THE BLACK TIDES OF HEAVEN (Tor.com, paper, $15.99 each). This is a tale of prophecy and family. Although their mother the Protector expects little of the twins, Mokoya develops the valuable ability to see — but never alter — the future. After she grows up and finds happiness with a family of her own, tragedy strikes, forcing her to rebuild herself as a scarred, hard-edged naga hunter. Meanwhile Akeha, the unwanted “spare” twin, eventually leaves to find his own fate, but he too is trapped by a prophecy that entangles his interests with those of rebels against the Protectorate.

All of this takes place amid a gorgeous, outlandish backdrop: a pan-Asian technomagic world in which matter and energy may be manipulated by the Slack, a kind of invisible field of connective threads that controls gravity, electricity and more. Here part of the world has only half the gravity that it should, just because that’s how magical lands work sometimes. Here adults impose their will on children in every way except the physical; when they come of age, children choose a gender identity and are then given medicines that shape their bodies to suit. Mokoya hunts nagas with the aid of a pack of trained velociraptors. She has a color-changing lizard arm. It’s joyously wild stuff.

These paired stories are being released simultaneously, and are clearly meant to be read together even though each stands alone. Each story follows one of the twins, though covering a different period in their lives; chronologically “Black Tides” precedes “Red Threads.” Reading the later book first has no negative impact on the overall tale, however. Highly recommended.