Foldpair Saga · 1Forge Lightning
Forge Lightning
Book One of the Foldpair Saga
A sister who calls down lightning, a brother who feels her at the edge of his mind, and a Council that's spent forty years learning to break a foldpair like theirs.
A five-book YA saga · one bond the world keeps trying to break
Foldpair Saga
Two people whose magic answers each other - a foldpair - are the rarest thing in the world, and the most feared. Across five books, this young-adult saga follows the bonds the Council has spent forty years learning how to break, and the people who refuse to be broken.
A foldpair is two people whose magic answers each other: a bond so rare that the Council has spent forty years learning how to break one. The saga follows one sister and one brother across five books, from the wagons that took them apart through cages, forges, and the price of both.
Upper young adult, written to cross over: fierce sibling loyalty, a slow-burn sapphic love, found family, and magic that costs something. For readers of An Ember in the Ashes, Strange the Dreamer, and The Priory of the Orange Tree.
The books, in reading order
5 books
Foldpair Saga · 2Shard Mercy
Shard Mercy
Book Two of the Foldpair Saga
The second book of the Foldpair Saga; expected spring 2027
Foldpair Saga · 3Shadow Woven
Foldpair Saga · 4Severed Sky
Foldpair Saga · 5Mended World
Questions
Did AI write your books?
The forge had more than one set of hands. This book is the third full version of itself: over two years I scribbled, rambled, and bludgeoned two earlier attempts at this story (wrong structure, wrong magic, right brother and sister) before I understood what it needed to be. This version was made with an AI collaborator — Claude, made by Anthropic — which drafted from my story, my characters, and my design, under my direction, chapter by chapter through to the final edit. I heavily edited the result: dozens of tracked revision rounds in which every line was kept, changed, or cut by me, the same way I'd already scrapped two entire misshapen drafts of my own. Every choice about these characters, this world, and the words that stayed is mine, and so are the mistakes. So is the wreckage that taught me which choices were right. There was real help on the bench, and it would be dishonest to leave it out.
I say so here because readers deserve to choose with full information. The same statement appears in the Acknowledgments at the back of Forge Lightning.