The Ascended

**By Bree Grenwich**

**Estimated Reading Time: 18 minutes**

**What This Story Explores:** The cost of hidden power, the bond between twins forged in blood and starlight, the price of vengeance, and what remains when everything you swore to protect is ripped away.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who crave dark romantic fantasy where gods are not benevolent, love is never safe, and the line between sacrifice and self-destruction blurs until it disappears.

Before the gods existed, the Primordials shaped reality from nothing. They dreamed oceans into being, whispered mortals into existence, and from their own pride, they created divine children called the Aesymar. Among these children, twelve rose above the rest and claimed dominion over both divine and mortal realms. Then the Primordials vanished. Whether they were destroyed, exhausted, or simply sleeping beyond reach, no one agrees. What matters is that they were gone, and the Twelve were left to rule. Olinthar seized the highest throne as King of Gods. Under his reign, divine power continued bleeding into the mortal world, touching ordinary people with extraordinary gifts. Some could pull fire from the air. Others could bend minds or shape illusions. A rare few carried power that should not exist in mortal hands at all. The gods, watching this proliferation with something between interest and alarm, created the Trials of Ascension: a brutal crucible where the power-touched either proved themselves worthy of joining the pantheon or died trying. For millennia, this order has stood unchallenged. The Trials are presented as an honor, a path to divinity. But everyone knows the truth. Most contestants do not survive. Those who do are changed beyond recognition. And the gods who watch from their thrones are not looking for worthy successors. They are looking for weapons, for pawns, for threats to eliminate before they grow too strong. Into this world, two children are born in a coastal village called Saltcrest. They are twins, a girl and a boy, and they carry a secret that could destroy them both. Their father is not the oyster farmer who raises them. Their father is Olinthar himself, the King of Gods, who assaulted their mother during a solstice festival and left her to die giving birth to his children. The girl, Thais, can pull constellations from the sky and shape them between her fingers. The boy, Thatcher, shows no power at all. For twenty-six years, their adoptive father Sulien hides them, loves them, and teaches them to survive. Then the priests come early, and everything burns. *The Ascended* is a novel about what happens when hidden power is exposed, when family is destroyed, and when two grieving siblings decide that the only acceptable response is to tear…