Threshold of Souls

He was built to end things. She was never meant to be spared.

In the Underworld, souls are healed, not punished - cradled through seven layers of quiet repair until they're ready to pass on. All of it depends on one man: Veles, Prince of the Underworld, whose eyes hold the power to absolve any soul on sight.

To protect the living from a gift that could unmake them instantly, he has worn a blindfold since before he can remember. He has never once removed it in company. He has never needed to.

Until his power starts to fail.

A soul resists him for the first time in the realm's history - and leaves a mark. Desperate to protect the order he's built, Hades turns to a prophecy that offers no clean answers, only a riddle: the fracture will not be mended by his son alone. It requires a bond. A living tether to a power that has only ever known the dead.

Enter Elowen, goddess of thresholds and inner truths - traded into a marriage she never asked for, trained her whole life to want nothing and reveal even less. She expects a monster. She finds something far more dangerous: a man who sees straight through every lie she's been taught to tell, including the ones she tells herself.

As his power keeps unraveling and something ancient and starving stirs in the dark below them, Elowen and Veles will have to choose between the composure that has always kept them safe - and the terrifying, unrehearsed truth of wanting to be seen.

Some doors, once opened, can't be closed again.