Mana Eater

Twelve years old, Dinga Vance watched an orc rift tear his Nigerian village apart — his father's last stand at a burning gate, his mother's iron grip dragging him into the smoke, a memory that never fully lets him go. Two years later, adopted into the wealthy, raider-lineage Vance family of Los Angeles, he enrolls at Ironveil Academy, one of the world's twenty-one Elite training grounds for those who close the rifts tearing holes into the world. Ridiculed at his Induction for summoning something small, chipped, and unimpressive — a reptilian companion he names Kpara under pressure, with no time to reconsider — Dinga is written off by nearly everyone who watches him kneel before the Summoner's circle. He starts at the bottom of Ironveil's ranks: F-Tier, humiliated in his first sparring match, half-trusted even by the small found-family of misfits who become his closest allies. But Kpara is not what he seems. Bound to a hidden trait no one else understands — least of all Dinga — his summon grows faster with every raid than any creature should, fast enough to draw suspicion from an instructor who's beginning to notice numbers that don't add up. As Dinga claws his way up through goblin-infested forests, hexed tunnels, and the political minefield of Ironveil's warring student houses, he carries two inheritances at once: his father's controlled, willing sacrifice, and his adoptive family's dutiful, undemonstrative love — and he's still not sure which one he's supposed to become. Mana Eater is a progression fantasy about grief worn as armor, power that grows in the dark, and the slow, hard-won work of becoming someone worth the name you were given.