The Purist

This is the first chapter of a big new book in my 'Lonhra Sequence' fantasy series arc. The actual book will be published by NineStar Press in early August 2018. Note: this cover is not the NineStar cover, but some art I did for the series.

Tagline: To rejoin his exiled wife, a bard seeks shapeshifting magic from the gods who cursed his race with extinction.

Blurb: Eridan wields the coveted bardic rank of Master-Singer to keep his dying race's culture alive in a brutal world of magic and war. He doesn't know Sfassa, his brawny wife and musical partner, traded her fanged-and-furred alien shape for a more-human one so she could be with him. Their idyllic marriage shatters when, wounded by an assassination attempt, Sfassa must forever return to her birth shape and her own people.

Eridan still adores his wife and unborn child, but his religion and heritage now forbid his marriage. He chooses love over propriety, abandons his job as a celebrity ambassador, and means to rejoin Sfassa by learning shapeshifting. His simple plan derails when he tangles with aristocratic power struggles, a volcano goddess playing games with mortal genetics, and Sfassa's hidden connection to the dangerously-charming genderfluid Dark Lord who enforces civilization's uneasy peace.

The secret Eridan needs is guarded by a tribe of forgotten gods who blame his race for their downfall. Their price for helping him? Become their agent in a war between immortals and the sapient, malevolent planet itself.