Licencewhat you may do with any of this

The five novels, the omnibus, the essays of The Anatomy of Chaos and the poetry braided through them are copyright Ankit Choudhury. All five books and the omnibus are registered with the Indian Copyright Office, and copyright in India runs for the author's life and sixty years after.

That is the formal part, and it is the least interesting thing on this page. Quote it freely — in a review, an essay, a video, a post, a thesis, a thread. Take a line, take a paragraph, take the whole of a discourse if it says what you need it to say. All that is asked is a name and, where there is somewhere to put one, a link to the page you took it from.

Every cover, every one of the forty-two portraits, every sigil and every plate on the Artwork page was made by the author. None of it was commissioned and none of it was outsourced.

This is not a page written to threaten anybody. If a picture from this site ends up on a moodboard, a phone screen, a fan edit, a video essay or a wall, that is the art doing its job. An unknown author's scarce resource is circulation, not control — so it is shared, and gladly, with credit where credit fits.

For coverage there is nothing to ask for at all. The press kit holds the covers, the sigil marks, an author photograph and approved boilerplate, downloadable with no form to fill in, free to use for press, review and editorial work. The site ships web-resolution files; print-resolution ones come on request.

Everything above is generous on purpose. This part is not, and it is the only place on this page where the answer starts as a no.

No adaptation right has been granted to anyone. Screen, television, streaming, animation and web series; stage and dramatic performance; audio drama, podcast fiction and radio; games and interactive work — all of it is reserved, and none of it has been licensed to any person or company. That is true today and it is worth saying plainly, because silence on a page this permissive reads as consent.

Fan work is still welcome and nothing here changes that: read it, quote it, draw it, film a video essay about it. What needs a conversation first is an adaptation of the story itself — a film, a series, a play, an audio drama, a game — commercial or not. That is a door, not a wall. It just has to be opened rather than walked through.

One reservation, stated plainly, because it only counts if it is stated. The writing, the artwork and the marks on this site are expressly reserved against text and data mining, and may not be used to train, fine-tune, evaluate, ground or develop any artificial intelligence or machine-learning system, or be included in any dataset for those purposes. This is an express reservation of rights for the purposes of Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790 and of any equivalent provision elsewhere.

This saga is built out of myth that is thousands of years old and belongs to nobody. Lucifer, Uriel, Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Azrael, Cain, Adam, Eve, Charon, Typhon, Apophis, Kalki, Kālachákra, Agartha, the Horsemen, the seals and the gates are public domain. They were not invented here and no claim is made to them. Write your own Lucifer. People have been doing it for four hundred years and the good ones are why this exists.

What was made here is the arrangement of them, and that is what copyright covers — which is enough.

A Ballad of Chaos is the name of this series and of the world it is set in. A trade mark application covering it, and the sigil, has been filed in India. An application is not a registration and this page will not pretend otherwise — but the name is in use, and it is not free for another work to take.

Referring to the saga by its name is not what this is about: reviews, articles, lists, videos, shops and libraries should all call it what it is called.

Ankit Choudhury · Pune, India · hello@balladofchaos.com