Eldritch

**Author:** Keri Lake **Estimated Reading Time:** 28 minutes **What This Story Explores:** A love that crosses the boundary between worlds and time itself, the cost of survival when survival demands becoming something monstrous, and the thin line between devotion and destruction. **Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want their romance drenched in horror, their heroes broken before they can be whole, and their endings earned through blood and sacrifice.

There are stories that begin with a prophecy, and there are stories that begin with a birth. *Eldritch* begins with both, in the undercroft of a Vonkovyan temple, where a Lyverian slave gives birth to a daughter whose eyes glow silver. The mother's throat is cut moments later by a priest named Sacton Crain, but not before she chokes out a dying prophecy: an ancient power loosed from thrall will smother two worlds in pestilent blight. The infant is meant to die in The Eating Woods, abandoned as sacrifice to a hungry forest. Instead, the forest spares her. A Crone Witch finds her guarded by ravens, disguises her silver eyes with blood magic, and leaves her on the doorstep of an old winemaker named Godfrey Bronwick. The baby grows up as Maevyth. The lorn. The foundling no one wanted. Nineteen years later, the prophecy is coming due. The mortal world of Mortasia is dying, consumed by a spider-plague that turns the infected into hollow, ravenous things. The magical barrier between worlds, the Umbravale, stands between Mortasia and Aethyria, where the immortals live. And Maevyth, who has spent her entire life believing she is ordinary, unwanted, and cursed, is about to discover that she is none of those things. She is something far more dangerous. Keri Lake builds *Eldritch* as a gothic romance in the truest sense: the atmosphere is oppressive, the world is rotting, and love is not a soft reprieve but a force that wounds as often as it heals. The novel moves between two timelines. One follows Maevyth in the present, trapped in a dying world with a sister who will not wake and an assassin whose power is failing. The other follows Zevander, a centuries-old Aethyrian cursed with sablefyre, the black flame that marks him as both weapon and abomination. His past is a litany of suffering: the Cinderbone Mines, the pleasure stables of General Loyce, the slow destruction of everything soft in him. His present is a race against his own unraveling. The central tension of the novel is not simply whether Maevyth and Zevander will survive. It is whether they can survive each other. Zevander's love for Maevyth predates her birth. He visited her in Caligorya, the shadow realm between consciousness and death, when she…