Licensewhat 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 welcome, and it is welcome by name. Write fan fiction. Draw fan art. Translate a passage so that somebody who doesn’t read English can have it. Record a reading, make a video essay, run a podcast arguing about the cosmology. None of that needs asking for, on five conditions that cost a fan nothing: give it away free, mark it plainly as unofficial, don’t use the series name or the sigils as branding of your own, don’t claim a right in the pieces of this world you borrow, and don’t present it as a continuation of the saga or a replacement for reading 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, fan-made or not. Fan fiction is prose, and that is a different permission from putting a camera or a stage in front of this. The one above is given freely; this one is a door rather than a wall, but it has to be opened rather than walked through.

The First Lie: The Journal of Lady Death is given away, and it is licensed far more openly than everything above. Everything on this page so far describes the five novels and the omnibus — books that are sold, and that you may quote generously but not reproduce.

The prelude is the opposite. You may pass the whole of it on, unchanged and free, to anyone: post the file, hand out copies, put it in a library. That permission belongs to that book alone and does not reach the five novels — and the reverse is also true, which is why the two live on separate pages rather than one.

If you arrived here from the back of the prelude looking for its terms, they are here in full.

Everything this page says yes to is a permission, given freely and meant warmly. None of it is a transfer, and nothing here hands anybody a share of anything. That distinction is the whole reason the page can afford to be this open: a permission can be generous because it can also be withdrawn, where a right signed away is gone for good, from everybody, forever.

So none of it is exclusive — the same yes is given to everyone who reads this, and giving it to you takes nothing from the next person. None of it is yours to pass on, resell or license to somebody else. It is given for the uses described above, it ends if those terms are broken, and it can be withdrawn going forward without notice. Not enforcing something once is not giving it up.

All of which is the formal shape of something simple. Share the books. Quote them. Draw them. Argue with them. Nobody has ever been asked to stop, and the only reason any of this is written down is so that the generosity reads as a stated position rather than an oversight somebody might one day mistake for a loophole.

People do write and ask, and the answer is almost always already somewhere above. So here it is again, in the shape the question actually tends to arrive in.

“Can I write fan fiction, draw fan art, or translate it?” — Yes, and you don’t have to ask. Keep it free, mark it plainly as unofficial, and don’t use the sigils or the series name as branding of your own.

“Can I record a whole book as an audiobook, animate it, or film it?” — No, and it isn’t personal. Those rights are reserved whole, and there are no pieces of them lying around to give away. Excerpts, readings and commentary are welcome, and that is a genuinely different thing.

“Can I sell my fan work, put it behind Patreon, or run ads on it?” — No. Free only.

“My idea doesn’t match any of these.” — Then write and say so. The honest answer is often not right now, but tell me more — which is an actual answer, not a polite way of saying no.

This saga draws deliberately on the shared inheritance of Abrahamic, Hindu, Greek, Egyptian and Norse myth — stories thousands of years old that belong to nobody. Lucifer, Uriel, Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Azrael, Cain, Adam, Eve, Charon, Typhon, Apophis, Kalki, Kālachakra, Kalpavriksha, Agartha, the Horsemen, the seals and the gates are public domain, the common property of everyone. 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 is claimed is what was invented: the coined vocabulary, the epithets, the cosmology as written, and the particular arrangement of all of it into this universe. That is what copyright covers — and it 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