Veyden: Book 1- Wanderbourne

David Novak has spent his life trying to stay unnoticed.
Nineteen years old, aging out of foster care, stuck in a dead-end job in a dying town, David knows one thing for certain: nothing in his life has ever made sense. Strange things happen around him when he's angry. Worse things when he's scared. He's learned to ignore it-because no one ever stays long enough to explain.
Then he meets Jacob Morrey.
Jacob belongs to a world David was never meant to see-a hidden society of mages known as the Veyden, bound to elemental beings and governed by ancient houses whose power shapes the world from the shadows. When David is pulled into that world, he discovers the truth he's been searching for his entire life:
He was never ordinary.
He is Wanderbourne-a mage born without a house, untrained, unclaimed, and dangerously late to his awakening. Magic has been building inside him for years, and without control, it should have destroyed him.
But it didn't.
As David begins to train, to craft his wand, and to bond with a shadow elemental that seems to know him better than he knows himself, whispers of a fallen Apex House resurface. A missing heir. A collapse that was never fully explained. And horrors-things that should not exist-are stirring again.
The more David learns, the more he realizes the truth may be worse than ignorance.
Because belonging has a cost.
Power demands order.
And some people were never meant to be found.