In a world where power is everything, Wren has none.
Among the Sideri—a magical people defined by the ember they carry within—Wren is an aberration. No ember manifested when she came of age. No power. No place. She has spent years confined to the Citadel, catalogued as defective, watched over by monks who measure the stars and know far more about her fate than they will say.
The Citadel children are raised on a story so beautiful it never occurred to Wren to question it: that they were chosen, that their births under the alignment were sacred, their years of preparation a gift, their futures already written in starlight.
Then a stranger appears in the dark of the catacombs—armed, lethal, and belonging to a world the Citadel had spent years convincing her didn't exist. Griffon is the queen's former assassin, one of the most feared men in the kingdom, and he is very much being hunted. He doesn't offer rescue. He offers one brutal truth: for someone like her, the only fate is an early death.
Wren runs.
What follows is an escape across a continent she has never seen—through a city built beneath the sea, aboard an airship that falls from the sky, and into the court of a foreign king whose hospitality may be more dangerous than the tracker still on Griffon's trail. At every turn, Wren finds that the world is nothing like she was taught—and that nearly everything the Citadel taught her was designed to keep her from questioning it.
Griffon is many things: a deserter, a killer, a man who grips a malachite dagger the way others touch a talisman. He did not agree to protect her. He did not agree to stay. He keeps doing both anyway. She is sharp and relentless and strange, and he has stopped pretending her presence doesn't change something. The feelings building between them are inconvenient, irrational, and, given that someone is still trying to separate his head from his shoulders, profoundly ill-timed.
Beyond the Citadel, everything Wren thought she knew about herself begins to unravel. The farther she runs, the more she suspects the Citadel was never afraid of what she lacked—but of what she might be.
The Stargazer is a slow-burn romantic fantasy featuring intricate magic, forbidden knowledge, sharp banter, deadly secrets, ancient puzzles, and romantic tension stretched to its breaking point. It is the first book in the Embers of Distant Suns series.
