The Stargazer

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. She believed it with her whole heart. It made her captivity feel like a chrysalis. It made her emberless state feel like the only real failure.

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: the fate for someone like her is no more than 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 the more she sees of it, the more she suspects that she herself may be nothing like what she was told.

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.

Wren has spent her entire life being told she is broken. She is starting to wonder if the world simply doesn’t have a name for what she is yet.

The Stargazer is a slow-burn NA romantasy for readers who like their magic systems detailed, their banter sharp, their heroines more likely to solve a ancient puzzle than wait to be rescued, and their romantic tension stretched to the absolute limit. It is the first book in the Embers of Distant Suns series.

Perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas and Jennifer L. Armentrout.

Content warnings: violence, death, captivity, threats of slavery, threats of execution, religious oppression, substance use, panic attacks, trauma flashbacks, and grief over the loss of family. The romance is slow-burn; this book contains no explicit sexual content.