Atheria: The Burning Child

Aves has lived her whole life in the Lower City of Seradore - fighting, surviving, and pretending the sparks that ignite from her fists mean nothing. She believes in people, not destiny. In Alben, the old warden who raised her, not in gods she has never met.

But when a run-in with the Blackveil Circle's illegal Redium trade lands her in the palace cells, everything she kept at arm's length comes rushing in. A princess who recognizes her from a childhood afternoon neither of them forgot. A king who sees her as a problem to be solved. A trial by combat that ends not with a victor but with the sky going dark and something ancient stirring at the edges of the world.

Sent from Seradore on a diplomatic errand she did not ask for, Aves finds her way to Veldra - the ancient jungle at the heart of Atheria - and to Elder Thalan, the last of his kind, who has been waiting for her longer than she has been alive.

What she learns in Veldra will shatter everything she thought she knew about herself, about the world, and about the flame she has been carrying without understanding since the day she was born.

Meanwhile something older and darker than any Sentinel or syndicate is moving through the five regions. It has been looking for her for seventeen years.

It is getting closer.

Atheria: The Burning Child is the first book of the Atheria Chronicles - an epic fantasy about identity, power, and the cost of becoming what the world needs you to be before you are ready.