The Wound
Where the sun used to be there is a pale scar, weeping thin coppery light down onto the ash. Never bright. Never warm. Just enough to see by, and to remind you what was taken.
A dark fantasy romance series
The Sundering Vows
She died in the ruins.
Something older woke in her place.
From the prologue
Before
Before the sky was broken, it sang.
They were clever. I will grant them that, even now, even after everything.
They learned to reach past the thin skin of the world into the dark beneath it — and they learned to catch us. To pour us, screaming, into cages of flesh and bone.
And then they came for me.
I let them.
They named that breath the Severing. A small word. Your kind is always making small words for enormous things; it is how you go on living beside them.
Three hundred years I drifted, thin as smoke, waiting — because that is the one thing I have always been better at than anything else that has ever lived.
And then, deep in the wreck of one of their fallen fortresses, a girl was dying.
Do you want to live?
And she — my ruin, my patience rewarded, the answer to three hundred years of waiting — she said the word that would unmake everything all over again.
She said, “Yes.”
Oh, little vessel. You have no idea what you’ve done.
— Vaelor, the Sundering
Paperback·Kindle·~700 pages
Book One
The Hollow
and the Pyre
She was sent a hunter to end her.
She wasn’t expecting to be chosen.
Maren Holt went down into the ruins to pay a debt. She came back carrying a god.
Bound to the ancient entity whose escape shattered the sky three hundred years ago, Maren is now the most hunted woman in the Reach — a walking apocalypse the Radiant Choir has sworn to burn. So they send their deadliest blade to do it.
But Warden Sorin Rell’s holy fire dies in his hands the moment he finds her. Because the monster he came to execute is spending pieces of her own soul to keep from harming a single innocent — and the truth the Choir has buried for three centuries is worse than any heresy: burning her won’t end the god. It will free it.
Hunted across a dying world, a woman who refuses to surrender, a warden who’s stopped believing his own certainties, and the seductive darkness in her head that would rather fade than let her go must learn the one thing that could save them all — the difference between being owned and being chosen. Before an inquisitor forces the choice for them, and breaks the sky a second time.
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For readers of Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros. A dark, slow-burn fantasy romance.
Adult (18+): fantasy violence, grief, and moderate on-page intimacy.
The world
The Ashen Reach
Three hundred years ago a radiant civilisation learned to chain gods inside human bodies, and reached for one too great to hold. The binding failed. The sky broke. What is left is a dim, ash-tinted country under a wounded sun — and the people who scratch a living from the bones of the world that ended.
The Marrows
A salvage town built inside the ribcage of a fallen sky-leviathan — a dead god’s skeleton roofed in black metal no fire can melt. Poor, superstitious, tight-knit, and quick to turn on what frightens it.
Solace & the Choir
The last great city, raised in the crashed hull of a sky-fortress and ruled by the Radiant Choir, who preach that the sun can be re-sung and the Hollow-bound must burn. Order, light — and a gilded cage of lies.
The Gallows
A ruin-hold deep in the Reach, held by Corvath the Gray — a Hollow-bound warlord far down the road to consumption, and a mirror of everything Maren could still become.
The bargain
Every use of
it costs you
something
The Hollow are bodiless fragments of an older unmaking. They cannot act in the world without a living host — so they wait for a moment of death or utter despair, and they offer a trade.
Nothing’s free. What does it cost.
-
The offer
You are dying, and something in the dark asks whether you would rather not. Most say yes. Almost nobody understands what they have agreed to.
-
The Mark
Black veining spreads beneath the skin like cracks in glaze. The eyes pale toward silver. The skin goes cold. A heavily used Vessel is unmistakable — and hunted on sight.
-
The cost
Every use feeds the thing inside you and cedes it ground: a memory, a warmth, a degree of control. And the power feels good to use. That is the trap.
-
The end of it
Fed long enough, an ordinary Vessel empties out into a mindless wraith. A great Hollow, fed long enough, walks free — and breaks the sky a second time.
-
The one leash
It cannot act without her consent. It needs her yes. Which is the only reason any of this is still a choice — and exactly why it never stops asking.
The three
Three claims on one heart
Is love the thing that saves us, or just another thing that owns us? The book puts that question to one woman three different ways, and refuses to answer it for her.
The salvager
Maren Holt
Twenty-six, practical, guarded, dry as ash. Orphaned young; learned early that love equals loss, so she keeps no one close and calls it sense. She went into the wreck to clear a debt and came out Marked, with a town at her back reaching for torches. They have a name for her now. The Ashwake.
“Nothing worth having ever is.”
The hunter
Sorin Rell
A Pyrewarden of the Radiant Choir, eleven years in the fire and the most trusted blade the Choir owns. He burns the Hollow-bound to atone for the one he could not save — his sister. He was sent to end Maren. He was not told what killing her would let out.
“The girl on the pyre was fourteen years old, and I counted the buckles on my bracers so I would not have to count her ribs.”
The thing that stays
Vaelor
The Sundering. The entity that broke the sky and spent three centuries thin as smoke, waiting. He speaks only in her mind — patient, amused, old as grief. He will never shout. He will never leave. He will simply keep asking, because he has all the time in the world and she does not.
“I’m here. I will always be here. Whatever they do to you, whoever turns from you, whatever this world takes — I stay. That’s what I am. I’m the thing that stays.”
The first pages
Begin where they do
Chapter One — Maren
The dead sky-leviathan had shifted in the night, and that was either going to make us rich or make us corpses, and Bram wouldn’t tell me which until he’d had his tea.
“You’re going to drink that whole pot before you say a useful word, aren’t you,” I said.
“I am.” He blew across the tin cup, unbothered, the way he was unbothered about most things that would have had a younger man screaming. Bram Coale had been salvaging the Marrows since before I was born, and he had exactly two speeds — asleep, and slow. “A useful word, spoken too quick, is just a mistake wearing better clothes. Sit down, Maren. You’re making the light nervous.”
I did not sit down. I stood at the mouth of our lean-to and looked out over the town, such as it was.
We called it the Marrows because that was what it was: a town built inside the ribs of a dead god. Three hundred years ago one of the Ascendancy’s great sky-leviathans — a fortress the size of a mountain, they say, though nobody living has seen it whole — had come down out of the burning sky and buried its skeleton in the grey earth of the Reach. Now we lived in it. Shanties and forges and rope-bridges strung between ribs of black Ascendancy metal that no fire could melt and no rust could touch, curving up over our heads like the vaulting of some vast cathedral to a god who had died screaming. When the wind came through the gaps it made a low sound, almost music, almost words. The old folk said it was the leviathan still trying to sing. I’d stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat.
Beyond the ribs, the Reach went on forever — grey hills under a grey sky, and above it all the Wound, that raw pale scar where the sun should be, spilling out its thin coppery light. Never bright. Never warm. Just enough to see by, and to remind you what had been taken.
Chapter Two — Sorin
The girl on the pyre was fourteen years old, and I counted the buckles on my bracers so I would not have to count her ribs.
Six buckles. Three to a wrist. I had done up each of them that morning in the grey before dawn the way I had done them up every morning for eleven years, in the same order, left wrist first, because order is a kind of prayer and I had long since stopped believing in the other kind.
Her name was Sefa. I had made it my business to learn it, because someone should, because the Choir would not write it anywhere but in the Ledger of the Cleansed, and that book is not kept for remembering. Sefa. Fourteen. Taken by a Hollow three weeks ago when a scavenging accident should have killed her and didn’t, which is how it always begins — a death you walk away from, a bargain you don’t remember making.
I knew all of this. I had built my life on knowing all of this. It was true, and it was necessary, and it did not make the counting any easier.
“You’re doing the thing with your face again,” Brenn murmured beside me. “The Cantors will think you disapprove.”
“I do disapprove.”
“Of the heresy, Sorin. Try to disapprove of the heresy.”
The series
Three vows
Book One stands on its own — and opens a door. Ahead lie the lost Ascendancy method that could truly end a god, the real shape of Vaelor’s design, and the question the whole series is built to answer: can Maren ever be free without unmaking the world?
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Book One
The Hollow and the Pyre
A salvager dies in the ruins and wakes bound to the thing that broke the sky. The Choir sends its best blade to burn her. Neither of them knows what burning her would free.
Out now
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Book Two
Untitled
The hunt for the Quietus — the lost method that can truly end a great Hollow — and the discovery that the Choir’s inquisitor never wanted the Sundering dead at all.
In progress
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Book Three
Untitled
The true story of the Ascendancy’s fall, Vaelor’s real design, and the last vow: what Maren is willing to lose to be neither owned nor alone.
Forthcoming
Do you want to live?
She said yes.
The Hollow and the Pyre — Book One of The Sundering Vows, by Elara Voss.
Out now in paperback and Kindle.