Some battles aren't fought with swords—they're fought between duty and desire.
She has served her god since she was fifteen—a god who answers when she calls. She has never once dared ask for the one thing she wants most.
Sent away as a child to become a priestess-knight—a paladin of a Church whose god is no distant idea but a living power that moves through her hands—Coralin Callens buried a truth she couldn't confess even to herself: she has loved Athos, the foster-brother she was raised beside, since before she had a word for it. Now, after fifteen years apart, he rides to meet her at the gates of the holy land—a crown prince, a war-hardened Royal Marshal, haunted by dreams of a holy sword that he cannot reach.
Neither of them knows what their god—and the enemy hunting them both—already does: that the war tearing their world and the pull between them are the same thread, and that Heaven itself has a stake in whether two people raised as family can become something their peers swear they must not.
Duty forbids it. A king's blessing hangs on it. An enemy has already marked her as the easier one to kill. And still, mile by mile down the long road to the holy city, the longing only deepens—fifteen years of restraint pressed into a single ungloved touch, a confession neither means to make, a nearness that costs them nearly everything honor demands.
Theirs isn't a world where goodness comes cheap. It's one where staying honorable costs something real—and they choose to anyway.
What God Has Ordained is an epic, faith-forward romantasy of forbidden love, a war for their world, and a slow burn fifteen years in the making. It’s for readers who like their romance clean but never timid, their fantasy worlds vast and lived-in, and their gods close enough to break a heart.
Tropes:
- slow burn
- forbidden love
- clean romantasy
- immersive world
- fantasy faith in a fantasy world
