Anathema

**Author:** Keri Lake

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** A cursed assassin who has killed hundreds finds his deadliest power refusing to harm the one woman fate has bound to him. A shunned mortal girl discovers she is the last heir to an extinct bloodline of death-worshippers, and that the monsters she was taught to fear may be the only family she has left. Their collision ignites a dark, obsessive love story set across two worlds separated by a forbidden boundary.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who crave gothic dark fantasy with morally gray heroes, slow-burn romance that earns every moment of heat, and heroines who discover monstrous power inside themselves. Those who love cursed immortals, ancient bloodlines, forbidden worlds, and stories where love and destruction are the same flame.

There are stories about curses, and then there are stories about what a curse does to the person carrying it. Keri Lake's Anathema belongs firmly to the second kind. It begins with a mother watching her infant son thrown into a fissure of black fire, and it never really lets go of that image. The flame that should have killed the baby instead marks him, binds him, and slowly transforms him into something his own family locks away. Two centuries later, that same flame will refuse to kill a mortal girl, and everything the cursed man believes about himself will begin to crack. The novel moves between two worlds. Aethyria is an immortal realm of ancient mages, political intrigue, and forbidden magic, where the ruling Magestroli guard their power with ruthless precision. Mortasia is the mortal world, a place Aethyrians dismiss as a diseased wasteland, separated by the Umbravale ward. The boundary between them is supposed to be absolute. It is not. People cross. Things cross. And what crosses changes everything. Maevyth is nineteen, an orphan branded as the lorn, a foundling discovered near the Eating Woods with ravens circling and a black rose beside her. She has spent her life being told she is cursed, unwanted, and dangerous. When her adoptive father dies, she faces a choice between forced marriage and a tongueless life serving the church. Instead, she bleeds on an ancient bone archway and awakens something that has been waiting for her for a very long time. Zevander Rydainn is the Lord of Eidolon castle, a secret assassin for the king, and the bearer of sablefyre, a divine black flame that should not exist inside a living body. The flame is killing him, or rather, transforming him into something like his older brother Branimir, who now lives in a cellar surrounded by spiders, his skin turned to bark. Zevander has spent years hunting…