Duskbound

**Author:** Bree Grenwich

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The cost of being truly seen, the weight of inherited power, and the terrible clarity that comes when the stories we were raised to believe turn out to be lies. It is a story about shadows that do not destroy but reveal, and about choosing to fight for a world that never fought for you.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want their fantasy dark and their romance earned, who love heroines forged by survival rather than destiny, and who believe that the most dangerous battles happen inside the self before they ever reach a battlefield.

Fia Riftborne has spent her entire life learning to be invisible. Branded as a child for a crime she did not commit, conscripted into the very Guard that destroyed her homeland, she survived by becoming small, quiet, forgettable. Shadows were not her weapon. They were her hiding place. She pressed herself between their pages like a flower someone wanted to preserve but never let bloom. Then Laryk found her. A general in the Sídhe Guard, powerful and perceptive, he saw something in Fia that she had trained herself to bury. His attention pulled her from the margins and into a world of dangerous visibility. But being seen did not destroy her. It revealed her. And the power she had always feared, the focus that let her reach into other minds, became something she could finally wield rather than suppress. Duskbound picks up in the aftermath of that transformation. Fia has chosen love over fear, light over shadow, action over hiding. She has turned her back on the darkness completely, certain it belongs to her past. She is wrong. The novel opens with Fia imprisoned in an obsidian tower in Ravenfell, capital of Umbrathia, the realm she was raised to believe was her enemy. She has been captured at a ball in Emeraal, seized by a golden-eyed warrior named Aether, and locked away in solitary confinement. Six weeks pass. Her first escape attempt fails. The isolation is total. And then, slowly, through the persistence of a dagger-wielding soldier named Vexa, Fia begins to understand that everything she thought she knew about this realm, about herself, about the war between their peoples, was built on a foundation of lies. What follows is a story about unlearning. Fia discovers that the Duskbound, the shadow-wielders she was taught to fear, are not monsters but a dying people desperately trying to save their realm. She learns that the Void, the ancient darkness in the North, is not simply a force of destruction but something that recognizes her in ways she cannot yet accept. She uncovers the…