Caldera's Heart

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

Corren 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 Vorethari is corrupted by a working no one will claim, 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 scarred by an occupation her people cannot end. 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 the mountain pulls her into the tunnels, to a cell where the rebellion holds a captured invader, 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 powers in the obsidian tower, when they learn what Corren 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 falling one by one. The mountain is trembling as it hasn’t since the Ancients bound what sleeps beneath it. And every time Corren and Eliza touch, their two magics — his aura-craft, her god-given fire — reach for each other like they were made to be one working.

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.