ASHFALL

ASHFALLBook One of The Latherys Cycleby A. Thorne Salira Val’Corin was raised to become a queen. As the daughter of one of Thalenkar’s most powerful noble houses, her future has always belonged to duty, politics, and the crown prince she is destined to marry. But when a dragon attack turns a royal celebration into a massacre, Salira’s carefully ordered life is destroyed in a single night of fire and blood. Now orphaned by tragedy and trapped beneath the crushing expectations of a fractured empire, Salira is sent to the Unified Collegium Academy—a legendary fortress where warriors, arcanists, and monster hunters are forged to defend humanity from the horrors lurking beyond civilization. There, for the first time in her life, she is forced to confront who she is without the future chosen for her. Sereth Kaul has spent his entire life surviving. Older than the other initiates and hardened by years as a mercenary in the lawless Free Marches, Sereth arrives at the Academy carrying a cursed blade no one else can safely wield and a reputation that keeps most people at a distance. Quiet, dangerous, and watched closely by the Concord itself, he has long since accepted that he is not the kind of man who gets happy endings. Then he meets Salira. As deadly training, political schemes, and growing unrest threaten to pull the Academy apart, the bond forming between them becomes impossible to ignore. Drawn together by grief, violence, and the freedom they find in each other, Salira and Sereth discover that some connections are powerful enough to change the course of a life—and dangerous enough to destroy it. But while kingdoms fight over crowns and secrets stir beneath the surface of the world, something far worse is awakening in the dark. And the coming storm may consume them all. A sweeping epic fantasy featuring deadly academy trials, ancient conspiracies, dark romance, and a world standing on the edge of catastrophe.