Voreth's Chosen

Voreth chose them both. Someone made sure of it.

Eliza wakes beneath the volcano to an impossible gift: the mother she mourned for eleven years, alive, waiting to train her in everything the Daughter of Voreth was meant to be. But the deeper her training goes, the more she learns what her mother’s long silence bought — and the closer she comes to a truth that will shatter the chieftains’ council: her own father has been selling Voreth’s warrior-priests to the enemy, one son at a time.

Corren returns to the city wearing his old life like a borrowed coat. The Architects have noticed what he did on the slope, and the brilliant, patient Malvers has taken him as a student — offering answers about his order, his power, and his family that no one else will give. But the higher Malvers leads him into the obsidian tower, the fewer living things Corren finds at the top. The tower is keeping a secret. So is everyone who ever claimed to protect him.

Between them runs the bond — faint, forbidden, alive. In a city where Malvers reads auras the way priests read scripture, reaching for each other could kill them both. So they starve it, and deny it, and feel it anyway.

Then Eliza learns the truth her faith was built on: the meeting in the tunnels was arranged. Watched. Steered. And if human hands were inside the god’s asking, she no longer knows whether what pulls her toward Corren is Voreth’s will, her mother’s design — or her own.

Her father will use the bond to break her. Malvers will use it to find her. And when the last free sacred site falls under the tower’s shadow, the only way to take it back is the one thing they have never dared: the bond worked in the open, before both their peoples, where everyone can see exactly what they are.

Chosen or arranged. Hidden or claimed. The mountain is done waiting for their answer.

Two peoples. One lie. A love that survives only in the light.