If you’ve ever wished you could step inside a fantasy world where science isn’t the enemy of wonder—where real chemistry concepts power real adventures—then you’re in for something special. Welcome to MarBryn, a breathtaking realm where civilization runs on elemental truth, and every spell, machine, and miracle begins with the one rule everyone learns early:
No Metal, No Magic.
In Nix The Metal Horn Unicorn With Nickel Magic: Element 28 — Magical Elementals Chemistry Fantasy, the hero isn’t a wizard with a staff. It’s a dragon—calm, analytical, compassionate—whose magical abilities are rooted in one of the most essential elements on the periodic table:
Nickel (Element 28)
Because in MarBryn, the elements aren’t just background details—they’re the story itself.
A Bold New Entry in the Magical Elementals Chemistry Fantasy Series Takes Element 28 on an Epic Adventure
There’s a moment in every great fantasy story when the hero does something so perfectly suited to who they are that you feel it in your chest. In Nix the Metal Horn Unicorn With Nickel Magic — Book 28 of the beloved Magical Elementals Chemistry Fantasy Series — that moment comes when Nix stands alone in front of a humming ancient weapon capable of destroying thousands of lives, lowers his lightning-bolt etched horn to its core, and reverses its magnetic field from the inside out.
No fireworks. No dramatic speech. Just precise, grounded, exactly-what-was-needed Nickel Magic doing what it was always built to do.
If you haven’t met Nix yet, now is a very good time to start.
Who Is Nix?
Nix is a nickel horn unicorn — deep grayish-purple coat, silver-lavender mane that billows dramatically when he gallops, a distinctive zigzag-etched horn that glints with a quiet starburst of light, and a long mustard-gold fringed scarf that is equal parts fashion statement and personality summary. He is bold, quick-witted, fiercely loyal, and possessed of a dry humor that lands best when he delivers it with a completely straight face.
He is also, by any measure, an underdog. Nickel magic doesn’t get the headlines that fire magic or lightning-strike elemental powers do. It doesn’t look impressive at a glance. What it does — strengthen, protect, conduct, preserve, catalyze, connect — is the kind of work that holds everything together quietly while flashier forces take the credit.
Sound familiar? Good. That’s exactly the point.
The Adventure Awaits on MarBryn
Nix lives aboard the Halstable, a vast invisible city-ship on the planet MarBryn, home to thousands of unicorns stranded generations ago from their home world in the Moon-Star system. When his horn pulses with the signal that a unicorn is in grave danger somewhere south, he and his silver-horn stablemate Silubhra set off into the night — and stumble into something far larger than a rescue mission.
What follows is a breathless journey across one of fantasy fiction’s most richly imagined worlds: through the glittering mineral-weave trees of Lethean Silva, into the electromagnetic interference field of Guarded Forest, through the market lanes of Bugansville, and finally to a climactic battle at the iron-ridge fortress of a rogue chemist with a grudge, a genius-level knowledge of ancient elemental synthesis, and a nearly-completed weapon that could destroy the Halstable entirely.
Along the way, Nix picks up an extraordinary team: Tanra, a warrior-elf ranger whose precision is matched only by her economy of words; Alvar, a young chemist from the City of Kudos who calculates molecular bonding structures from beneath collapsed forge ruins with cheerful academic focus; and Rendala, a master chemist whose coat has more pockets than most people have thoughts, each one containing exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment.
Why This Book Stands Apart
The Magical Elementals Chemistry Fantasy Series has always done something genuinely rare: it makes the periodic table feel like the most exciting document ever written. Every element in the series becomes a living magic system grounded in real science. Nickel’s ferromagnetism becomes magnetic mastery. Its catalytic properties become the ability to amplify other magic without being depleted. Its corrosion resistance becomes a shield against dark magic. Its role in rechargeable batteries becomes an energy storage power that keeps the whole team functional when everyone else is running on empty.
This is science education that doesn’t feel like education. It feels like adventure.
And at the center of it is a hero whose core message resonates long after the last page: you don’t have to be the flashiest, the most powerful, or the most celebrated force in the room to be the one everything depends on. Sometimes the most important magic is the kind that makes everyone around you stronger.
Ready to Read?
Nix the Metal Horn Unicorn With Nickel Magic is Book 28 in the Magical Elementals Chemistry Fantasy Series — perfect for middle grade and young adult readers, science enthusiasts, fantasy lovers, classroom read-alouds, and anyone who has ever been told they weren’t quite enough and refused to believe it.
Pick up your copy today and discover what Nickel Magic can really do.
Because you don’t need to be gold to be worth something.
Get it in Kindle, Paperback or Audio.
Links and Notes for Nix’s chemistry inspired magical abilities:
Nix’s ferromagnetic detection ability (sensing metal, “reading” the alloy in the debris)
Real nickel is only weakly ferromagnetic on its own, but nickel-rich alloys are strongly so — good grounding for a “metallic horn” that senses ferromagnetic materials:
- Is Nickel Magnetic? (University of Maryland physics dept.)
- Nickel Iron Alloys & Soft Magnetics — Arnold Magnetic Technologies
The forge-ruin alloy (“forty-two percent nickel, thirty-eight percent iron, twelve percent chromium”)
- Nichrome — Wikipedia
- Iron-Nickel Alloys — ScienceDirect Topics overview
- Natural nickel-iron precedent (why “pre-Settlement” builders might have had access to nickel-iron in quantity):
- Iron meteorite — Wikipedia, Nickel-iron meteorites — EBSCO Research Starters
Why the alloy “glinted” and survived millennia mostly intact (corrosion resistance)
- Why Nickel Rarely Rusts and Resists Corrosion
- Nickel Alloys for Corrosive Environments — Haynes International
Guarded Forest’s nickel-oxide bark causing compass/directional-magic interference
Nickel oxide nanoparticles do have documented magnetic/EMI-shielding behavior, which is correlates with “an electromagnetic interference field”:
- Nickel-containing composite material for electromagnetic radiation shielding — Springer
- Magnetic properties of NiO (nickel oxide) nanoparticles — ResearchGate
- 2 Magnetic Conditions That Impact Electronic Compasses — Jewell Instruments
Nix’s “life-reading” sense detecting heartbeats through stone (iron in blood)
Discovery of the magnetic behavior of hemoglobin — PMC/NIH
- Does blood have magnetic properties? — Science Learning Hub
- Blood in MRI Scans: The Truth About Hemoglobin and Magnetism
Draveth’s chemistry, hydrochloric acid dissolving the mineral array, and the Catalytic Amplifier’s nickel-based reaction chemistry
Nickel’s real-world role as a catalyst is a strong anchor for “Catalytic Amplifier”:
- Nickel: The “Spirited Horse” of Transition Metal Catalysis — ACS Catalysis
- Recent Advances in Nickel Catalysis — PMC/NIH
- Raney nickel — Wikipedia (a real nickel catalyst famous for being pyrophoric/reactive)
General reference for the Nickel Institute (industry body, good broad backing for alloy claims)
Author’s Fantasy License:
Hemoglobin’s iron is bound in a form that isn’t ferromagnetic enough to be magnetically detected at a distance the way the story implies, but it’s a fun bit of real biochemistry.
