Ignition

Rose has spent her whole life taking care of everyone else. Her best friend. Her brother. Her boyfriend who deserves better than what she can give him. She is good at showing up for people. She is less good at knowing who she is when nobody needs anything from her.New Year's Eve in Chicago was supposed to be just a party.Then the demons showed up.One alley fight and a pair of burning hands later, Rose learns two things: she is something called the Knight, a being born across lifetimes to protect someone she has never met, and the only way to keep the people she loves safe is to leave them behind.So she runs.Two months on the road. Gas station food and cheap motels and a growing body count of demons who made the mistake of getting too close. She is getting better at the fire. Better at the fighting. Less good at the part where she has to keep moving before anyone can matter.Then a drag show flyer stapled to a telephone pole in New Hampshire changes her plans for one night.Ignition is the first story in The Knight series, part of the In-Between collection. It is the story of a woman who finds out what she is made of when everything she was made for is taken away. Faela D. Talwyn is the author of the interconnected Hiraeth Sanctum universe, a multi-series world spanning bounty hunters, cosmic mythology, found family, and the kind of love that survives centuries.She writes stories that live in the space between grief and joy - where the characters are messy and complicated and loving each other badly in ways that feel uncomfortably true. Her work includes queer romance, divine mythology, slow burn relationships, and the occasional god who really should have just said something sooner.The Hairpin is the first story in The Board series, the celestial mythology layer of the Hiraeth Sanctum universe.Find her at faeladtalwyn across platforms. Some people are born knowing how to love. Rose was born knowing how to show up.Fierce, funny, and impossibly loyal, Rose has spent her whole life being the person everyone else leans on -- the sister who always shows up, the friend who never flinches, the girl who knocked a hotel door off its hinges at thirteen because someone she loved needed protecting. She will walk through fire for the people she claims as hers.She just will not say the words.The Knight follows Rose from her first kiss outside a small town Kansas ice cream shop to the ten months she spends on the run from something she does not yet have a name for -- building the woman who will one day stand at the center of a war between gods. Along the way she falls in love more than once, loses people she should have held tighter, and slowly learns the difference between being brave and being open.She spends her teenage years figuring out who she is drawn to and why. Not through labels or definitions but through living -- through the girl with dirty blond hair who made her stomach flip, through the best friend she loved differently than anyone else, through understanding gradually and without ceremony that what she needs is not a type but a feeling. A specific depth of connection that has nothing to do with who someone is and everything to do with who they are.Rose is not afraid of love. She loves fiercely -- her brother, her mother, the foster kid she claimed as family in kindergarten and never let go. She will say I love you to the people she considers hers without hesitation.What she cannot do is say it to a lover. Because that is a different kind of love. The kind she watched quietly destroy her mother. The kind that makes you stay in a house with someone who keeps leaving it. The kind that makes you smaller.She will have to learn that the right person does not make you smaller. They make you more.But that is a story for another series.This one is hers.