Aethel Realms

Jasmine Wright's world is one of quiet order, mending the fragile histories bound in leather and paper. But when her best friend, a fearless journalist, vanishes while chasing a story about the city's strange disappearances, Jasmine's meticulously crafted life is torn apart. Her desperate search plunges her into the misty, secret heart of Veridia, a place where the barrier between worlds is wearing dangerously thin. A terrifying confrontation awakens a power Jasmine never knew she possessed-a blasphemous, uncontrollable union of light and shadow. Suddenly, she is a living anomaly, hunted by two deadly forces. A ruthless, high-tech order of monster hunters sees her as a disease to be purged, while creatures of living shadow see her as a weapon to be controlled. Her only hope for survival lies in a fragile, dangerous alliance with Dominic Greene, the ancient and enigmatic king of the shadow-realms, a being whose protection may be more dangerous than the enemies at her back. As Dominic's own dark secrets are revealed, Jasmine learns her power is not just an accident-it's a legacy that could either mend the fracturing sky or shatter it completely. Caught in a war older than time, she must learn to control the storm within her before it consumes her, her city, and the very fabric of reality. But in a world of monsters and zealots, who can she truly trust when the greatest monster of all might be herself?

In the city of Veridia, reality is coming apart at the seams. Rips in the fabric of the world, known as "glitches," offer fleeting, terrifying glimpses into other realms and make the laws of physics unreliable. The city, and everyone in it, is living on borrowed time. At the heart of the chaos is Megan Davies, a woman warring with her own soul. She wields a dangerous and forbidden power-a dual heritage of shadow and light that threatens to tear her apart. Her only anchor is Alexander Walker, the ancient and enigmatic leader of the shadow-dwelling Nocturne Covenant, but their fierce love is entwined with the very secrets he keeps from her about her past and the true nature of the city's decay. Their fragile world is shattered by the arrival of Piers King, a charismatic zealot who leads an army of golden-armored Sunforged warriors. He preaches a gospel of purification, blaming the Nocturne for the glitches and launching a holy crusade to cleanse the city of their shadow. But his righteous war is a lie, a cover for a desperate hunt for three ancient artifacts that could rewrite reality itself. To survive, Megan must untangle a thousand-year-old deception, forge an alliance with an enemy she was sworn to hate, and survive a betrayal that will cut her to the core. She must embrace the storm within, because she is not just a weapon to be controlled-she may be the only key to saving them all.

The sky over Veridia is not falling; it's shattering. For centuries, a great metaphysical Shroud has held reality in its delicate embrace. Now, it's dying, and the city below is drowning in a storm of raw, untempered concepts. Shards of primordial light rain down, causing cobblestones to erupt into forests of bone-white coral. Wounds of absolute shadow bleed a hungry darkness that doesn't destroy, but simply *unmakes* whatever it touches. This is not an apocalypse of fire, but a quiet, terrifying unraveling of existence itself. In the heart of the chaos, two souls stand as the city's only defense. Amelia Sutherland, a scholar who can read the universe's source code and re-weave the fabric of existence. And Jonathan Rampling, an ancient, shadow-weaving king whose very essence can absorb the storm, at a terrible cost to himself. Together, they are a surgeon and a shield, performing impossible triage on a reality bleeding out from a thousand wounds. But their desperate efforts are only delaying the inevitable. They soon discover this is no natural decay, but a deliberate act of cosmic terrorism. A zealot, Robert Anderson, stands atop the city's tallest spire, actively tearing down the metaphysical anchors that hold their world together. They have mere days before the final anchor breaks and their world is not just destroyed, but completely and irreversibly unwritten. To stop him, they must journey into a dimension of pure sorrow to find a mythical key, only to uncover a ten-thousand-year-old lie: the Shroud is not a shield, but a prison for a forgotten god. Fusing epic fantasy with mind-bending metaphysics, this is a desperate race to not just save their world, but to decide if a reality built on a cosmic sin is worth saving at all.