Caldera's Heart

Her god told her to save him. He did not say why.

Griffin is a rising auramancer of the Lower Arcanum, sworn to the obsidian tower whose rulers conquered the caldera a generation ago. When a sacred site of the Vorethim is corrupted by magic no native should be able to wield, he's sent to find who bent that power — and the answer will crack open a conspiracy older than his order, deeper than the mountain, and closer to his own blood than he ever wanted to believe.

Eliza is a chieftain's daughter and a teacher of children wounded by a war her people cannot win. She hears Voreth in the thermal currents, feels the god's breath in every tremor, every wisp of steam — and lately, that breath has gone wrong.

When she finds a wounded invader bleeding in the tunnels her rebellion uses to kill his kind, Voreth's command cuts through everything she was raised to believe. Save him.

Her father will call it treason. Her oldest friend will call it betrayal. And the High Arcanum, when they learn what Griffin has seen — and who saved him — will call it something far worse.

Because the invaders are not only colonizers. They are hunting something sleeping in the heart of the volcano: an entity older than Voreth and far hungrier. The sacred sites are shattering one by one. Griffin's own sister has vanished into a rebellion she will not explain. And the mountain is beginning to tremble in ways it hasn't in a thousand years.

Voreth is all things. Life and death. Creation and destruction. And Voreth has chosen them both.

Two enemies. One god. A fire neither of them will survive alone.