The first girl paid for the future with her life. The second girl inherited it.
A hundred years ago, a mortal girl crossed into the cursed woods to save her brother and walked into a war between two ancient lords of shadow and light. She made her bargain. She discovered desire. And when the moment came, she burned everything down to seal the darkness back into the earth and speak a prophecy.
A queen forged by ruin. Rising in the time of dragons.
She never got to see her.
A century later, that queen arrives.
The Court of Embers is a dark romantasy duology about love strong enough to outlast death, legacies paid for in blood, and the war of crowns that two mortal women, a hundred years apart, were both willing to shatter themselves to end.
The Court of Embers
The woods take you, and you don't come back.
Every child in Oakhaven knows this. Bar the doors. Salt the windows. Don't listen for the music on the summer solstice. If you hear it, you're already lost.
Madeline Orsen has followed every warning her whole life. Then her twelve-year-old brother doesn't come home.
She crosses the salt line with nothing but a dagger and a dead woman's stubbornness. What waits on the other side is worse than she imagined and stranger than any nightmare. A revel of firelight and shadow, where creatures with burning eyes and too-wide smiles have noticed her before she can disappear into the crowd.
And where two ancient rivals are watching her with far more dangerous attention than the rest.
Draeven, Lord of Shadow, moves like winter given form. Cold, lethal, and devastatingly still. Orion, Lord of Light, radiates warmth like a fire you'd walk straight into without realizing you were burning. Both offer to find her brother. Both want something in return.
She has no leverage, no magic, and she has absolutely no patience for fae games.
What begins as a desperate bargain spirals into something far more consuming. Nights in courts of shadow and starlight, truths that cut sharper than any blade, and a lord who doesn't offer her safety but offers her something she wants far more. In a world built on beautiful lies, that may be the most dangerous thing she could fall for.
She came to save her brother. She never expected to lose her heart to the monster who kept her.
One mortal girl. Two rival lords. A night that will end in blood, prophecy, and a love that outlasts even death.
She buried everyone she has ever loved. The rage left behind is the only thing still keeping her warm.
Vesper Lockwood doesn't need a destiny. She needs revenge. But when she finds a dragon shackled in the dark, ancient, dying, bound by chains older than the fae courts themselves, she doesn't think twice.
She breaks his chains. He marks her in return.
The dragon's power brands itself into her veins, something vast and waking recognizing what she is before she can. And in a world where the fae courts have spent a hundred years hunting for the girl that power was meant for, Vesper has just put a target on her back that no amount of stubbornness will let her outrun.
Dragged into a realm of shifting courts, ancient wars, and told what she already suspects, Vesper is heir to a broken throne. The key to a world on the edge of ruin. The answer to a prophecy paid for in someone else's blood a hundred years before she was born.
Two lords want her. Draeven, Lord of Shadow, has been waiting longer than she knows, for reasons she doesn't yet understand. Orion, Lord of Light, wants what the prophecy promises. He always has.
Vesper, who has survived everything by wanting nothing, is about to discover that the most dangerous thing in any court isn't the monsters.
It's a crown that fits.
Dragon fire in her veins. A prophecy in her blood. And a throne paid for long before she arrived to claim it.
Coming May 2026
