Never Keep

**Author:** Caroline Peckham **Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The cost of vengeance, the lies nations tell to keep their people at war, the bonds that form between enemies, and the discovery that the monsters we are taught to fear may not be the real monsters at all.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who love dark fantasy with morally gray characters, enemies forced into alliance, hidden magical orders, ancient prophecies, and romances that burn with equal parts hatred and desire.

The Endless War has raged for so long that no one alive remembers its beginning. The floating island of Ironwraith belongs to the Skyforgers, whose air Fae rain death from above. The storm-battered nation of Stormfell belongs to the Raincarvers, whose water Fae answer with ice and fury. Between them lie the wastelands, the mechanical beasts, and the Reapers, an order of prophets who claim to serve the gods but guard secrets that could end the war overnight. Everyone knows the shape of the world. Everyone knows who the enemy is. Everyone is wrong about almost everything. Everest Arcadia is a Raincarver outcast, a water Fae whose mother was executed for treason and whose own family treats her as a stain on their name. She has spent years training for one purpose: to become a warrior, earn her place, and avenge the mother she lost. But when her half-brother shoves her through the Boundary, the magical wall that is supposed to kill anyone who touches it, Everest discovers the first of many lies. She survives. And survival, she will learn, is not the same as safety. Vesper is the Sky Witch, a legend of the Skyforger army at twenty years old. She has killed more enemies than she can count, earned the favor of Prince Dragor, and built her identity on blood and loyalty. But she has not yet Awakened her air magic, and the prince who owns her ambitions has begun to build walls around her that feel less like protection and more like a cage. When a stranger named Cayde Avior arrives with orders to shadow her unit, Vesper finds herself drawn to the first man immune to her Succubus gifts, a man whose secrets will cost her everything. This novel exists in the tradition of dark romantic fantasy, where desire and danger are inseparable, where enemies become allies and allies become betrayers, and where the line between monster and savior blurs beyond recognition. Caroline Peckham writes with the confidence of an author who knows her readers want intensity: intense emotion, intense violence, intense longing, intense betrayal. The tone is unrelenting. The atmosphere is cold, wet, and shadowed, full of stone corridors, underground rivers,…