Avalon Tower

**Author:** C.N. Crawford

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** A bookseller who discovers she belongs to a hidden magical lineage, the cost of becoming someone capable of war, and a love that survives a decade of misunderstanding only to face impossible sacrifice.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who love romantasy with genuine stakes, spycraft woven into ancient magic, and heroines who earn their power through blood, grief, and stubborn courage.

The war between humans and Fey has been grinding on for so long that most people have stopped believing it can end. The magical veil that separates human territory from occupied Fey France shimmers on the horizon like a promise of death, killing anyone who touches it. Behind that veil, King Auberon rules with dream magic and iron discipline, his soldiers patrolling cobblestone streets where fugitives are executed for the crime of existing. On the human side, MI-13 fights a desperate shadow war with dwindling resources and a single critical asset: Sentinels, the impossibly rare spies who can disable the veil itself. Avalon Tower opens with the death of one of those Sentinels. Agent Alix, one of only two in existence, bleeds out on a French street after walking into a Fey ambush. Her death is not noble or cinematic. It is eleven minutes late, distracted by forbidden feelings, and it costs humanity its most precious weapon. The war tips further toward catastrophe before the story even properly begins. Then the novel pivots to someone who has no idea any of this is happening. Nia Melisende is a twenty-six-year-old bookseller from Los Angeles who saved for five years to afford a vacation in France. She is eating birthday cake alone at a café when she notices a group of demi-Fey fugitives in torn clothes, desperate and hunted. One of them grabs her arm. A suspicious local glares. Fey soldiers are patrolling nearby. In the space of a few heartbeats, Nia makes a choice that will end her old life: she pretends to be a tour guide and starts herding twelve terrified fugitives toward the docks. What follows is a story about discovering that the world is larger and more terrible than you believed, and that you are larger and more terrible than you believed too. Nia learns she is demi-Fey, that she carries rare Sentinel magic, and that the hum she has heard against her skin her entire life is the sound of the veil recognizing her. She is recruited into Avalon Tower, a two-thousand-year-old spy academy hidden in the city of Camelot, where descendants of King Arthur's court train agents to fight the Fey. She arrives in bloodstained clothes and dollar-store sandals, surrounded by aristocrats…