A New Series in Development
The Ashqueen Saga
Fire keeps. Fire remembers. Fire is the only thing that does.
What it is.
The first YA romantasy from Mythroot. Seven books in the Pyralean Empire, a volcanic peninsula where the magic system breathes on a 33-second pulse and the priests measure their oaths against the rhythm of a sleeping founding phoenix. Phoenix riders, ashbond magic, a forced bond between the hidden heir of a purged bloodline and the crown prince whose father ordered the purge.
Lyra Vyrkael's blood ignites in open air. Every cut on her body since infancy has had to be wrapped before the air found it. The Drakharon purge eighteen years ago was about ending the Vyrkael bloodline because of this trait. Kaelos Drakharon was eight years old when his father took him into the Vyrkael nursery to confirm the kill. He saw a baby. His father decided the smoke had done the work. Kaelos has been having the same dream every night for eighteen years. He has not told anyone. He does not know whose baby it is until the day Lyra bonds her phoenix in the Caldera Pit and the dream wakes up across the room from him.
The bond is the engine of the romance and also the engine of the saga's most concentrated grief. Every full strength use of an ashbond burns days off both riders' lives. Kaelos has known since his bonding ceremony. He hides it from Lyra for four books.
Igniting blood
The Vyrkael signature. Lyra's blood catches fire in open air. The reason for the purge. The reason the phoenix descends in book one.
The ashbond cost
Every full strength bond use burns days off both riders' lives. Senior riders know. Junior riders find out the hard way.
The Ember Mark
The bond scar on each rider's right hand. Lyra's is white gold. No one in living memory has had a white gold mark.
The Cradle's Pulse
A 33-second volcanic rhythm. Pyralean culture is built around it. The Pulse changes in book four. The empire feels the wrongness before the priests can name it.
The Founding Phoenix
Not dead. Bored. Awake for two thousand years and asleep for none of it. The series is about the slow walk to giving her permission to die.
The Memory Pyre
Phoenixes pass memory by burning a feather. What a rider sees in the smoke is not always what they were meant to see.
The seven books
