Shadow Woven (working title)

About the book

Four hundred miles apart, a brother and a sister are learning the same lesson from opposite ends.

In the Frozen Peaks, Eamon climbs to the last of the Forge Monks and asks them to teach him starfire — the one flame that cleanses a blade without consuming it. He means to burn the corruption out of the steel he shares with his sister and carry the cure south. The Monks teach him. Then they teach him the wall behind his plan: the blade doesn’t hold the shadow, it receives it, live, down the bond — and no fire will purify the steel while his sister isn’t. The only people who ever survived what she carries didn’t burn it out. They housed it.

In the Deep Wastes, Liora trains with shadow-mages who don’t try to cure her. They teach her to live with it. To use it. To let it in. And the patient voice the Council planted in her has never sounded kinder — or prouder of her — as it prunes her warmth one quiet shelf at a time. She grows more capable and less herself, until the day she breaks and asks the woman she loves to come to her: a choice wholly her own, and exactly the one the thing inside her has been farming all along.

As Liora’s edges blur and the fold between them goes quiet, Eamon holds a dead captain’s last order — be the one who doesn’t go — and the one promise he was always going to break.

Sometimes the only way forward is through shadow.

Manuscript in revision; cover and release date to come.