Storm Of Defiance

Aethelgard fell in a single afternoon — not to war, not to plague, but to a ritual its own Archon cast to save it. The Severance was supposed to end the city's chaos. Instead it hollowed everyone near its heart into something correct, efficient, and no longer entirely themselves. Kaelen was eighteen when he pulled his sixteen-year-old sister out of it. He's spent every year since making sure that was enough. Years later, the Azure Trade Commission arrived to rescue what was left of Aethelgard — and used the gratitude it earned to build an empire bent on normalizing everything it could reach. Now Kaelen and Lyra are done running. Alongside a knife-sharp ex-cook, an exiled healer who talks to stone, a half-feral fighter with nothing left to lose, and a goblin inventor who treats mortal danger as an interesting variable, they're hunting the truth behind the Commission's stolen peace — straight into a mountain, toward a Guardian that may hold the key to their victory. Five volumes already drafted, with the story far from finished.