Anathema

Two centuries before the story begins, Lady Rydainn carries her infant son Zevander to a blazing vein of sablefyre—a divine black flame forged in Aethyria's molten core.

Two centuries before the story begins, Lady Rydainn carries her infant son Zevander to a blazing vein of sablefyre—a divine black flame forged in Aethyria's molten core. The corrupt mage Cadavros has struck a deal with her husband: protection from enemies in exchange for their sons' bodies. Branimir, the eldest, already bears grotesque bark-like skin and blackened veins from the same ritual performed weeks earlier. Cadavros tears Zevander from his mother's arms, shoves a fistful of black ember into the baby's mouth, then hurls him into the flaming fissure. Against all possibility, the infant survives—marked with burning eyes and a jagged scar across his cheek. His brother reads the ancient words seared into the baby's skin: a binding that declares whatever has been stolen can never be restored.

A foundling's blood awakens something ancient in cursed woods

Maevyth, nineteen and shunned since infancy as the lorn—a baby found abandoned near The Eating Woods of Foxglove Parish with ravens and a black rose—stands at the bone archway clutching her adoptive father's death notice. Without him, she faces forced marriage or a tongueless life serving the church. In fury, she writes blasphemy on the letter, which blows into the forest and returns bearing different words in her handwriting, equating god with death. Reaching for it, she slashes her forearm on a protruding bone. Her blood sizzles against the ivory, the forest shimmers with a translucent sheen, and a child's voice whispers her name. A blast of darkness knocks her flat. She finds a silver-eyed raven impaled on the archway, mercy-kills it, and buries it beneath a winterberry bush.

An assassin's only hope lies across the forbidden boundary

In immortal Aethyria, Zevander Rydainn—Lord of Eidolon castle, cursed bearer of sablefyre, and one of King Sagaerin's secret assassins—delivers a bloodstone to the disgraced mage Dolion. For years, Zevander has hunted descendants of the six founding bloodlines, turning their blood to stone through forbidden magic. The stones will power the septomir, an ancient weapon Dolion claims can break the sablefyre curse that is slowly transforming Zevander into a creature like his brother Branimir. But six stones are insufficient. Dolion's foresight reveals the seventh lies in Mortasia—the mortal world beyond the Umbravale ward, a place deemed a diseased wasteland. He hands Zevander a passage spell and the coordinates: a bedroom window facing a bone archway. The target is mortal. It should be simple.