Chapter 1
Liora walked off the altar alive. Mira stayed behind to learn what freedom would cost.
THE ASH-BOUND DAUGHTER
Book Two of
The Blood Oath Cycle
A full-length novel
Three days after her sister leaves Alderfen, the village is already being taught a new story.
High Priest Elorin calls it Order. Mercy.
Peace. The bells keep the wrong hours. Ash appears where no fire has touched.
And every kindness the temple offers seems to arrive with a hand already closing around someone’s throat.
Mira Hale knows what altars cost. She knows what fear can make neighbors call holy.
So while Elorin turns hunger into obedience and grief into doctrine, she begins building something dangerous: a resistance made of root-cellars, stolen records, and frightened people who keep choosing one another anyway.
The only person who can teach her how the machine thinks is Soren, a temple defector whose hands once kept its ledgers. He knows how Mercy is counted, how Order is stamped, and how quickly a frightened village can be taught to call obedience peace.
Then the village gives Mira a new name. Daughter of ash. Her voice begins to fail, ash blooms at her throat, and the thing they are trying to call a miracle comes to Alderfen hungry.
This time, the sister they expected to grieve quietly is the one who means to bring the whole lie down.
Coming next from E. C. Gregory