“Control or care. Suppression or surrender. Nothing is past saving — including yourself.”
Across the toxic, beautiful reaches of the Obsidian Nebula, the Grand Archon Vaelen rules through a single brutal doctrine: order through amputation. His engineers seed living curses into human bodies — nanite afflictions that grant terrible power even as they slowly kill their hosts — and his geneticists brew the Weave, a bioweapon meant to leash every world that still breathes free. But the empire’s own instruments are turning in his hand.
Three fated pairs discover that the cure the Hegemony fears most is the one thing it has tried to burn out of them: needing each other. A dying salvager and an iron-cursed enforcer. A control-armored geneticist and the captured rebel she was ordered to destroy. A sheltered archivist and a feral scout who is the second half of an ancient lock. Bound through all three books by Vector, a sardonic AI who manufactures every impossible chance, this is a series about cursed bodies and the people who refuse to amputate them.
Three fated pairs. One dying tyrant. A galaxy that insists nothing is past saving.
Book One — Heart of Rust and Starlight (Lyra & Jaxen)
“When a dying salvager pulls a man turning to iron out of a fallen ship, her killing power doesn’t burn him — and that one impossible mercy is the only thing that can save them both.”
On a junk world beneath a beautiful, poisonous sky, Lyra teaches dead machines to fly again. The one thing she can’t fix is herself: a Starlight Core is fused into her chest, slowly consuming her, and only a melting dampening collar keeps it leashed.
Then a ship falls out of the burning nebula, and inside it is Jaxen — an exiled imperial enforcer whose body is calcifying from the inside. He is certain he is a monster who destroys whatever he touches. But when Lyra lays her hand on him to heal him, her power should scream and burn. Instead, for the first time in her life, it doesn’t hurt.
With Vaelen’s dragnet tightening and the flagship Iron Sceptre bearing down, the two fugitives uncover the truth hidden in a dead man’s files: their two curses are halves of one engineered system. The cure was never a facility on the rim. The cure is each other.
Alternating First Person (Lyra & Jaxen) • HEA
Book Two — Chains of Light and Shadow (Evelyn & Kaelen)
“She was ordered to harvest his mind. Her own blood is the only thing in the galaxy that can save it — if she can survive needing him.”
Forty-one thousand meters above an acid cloud-sea, Evelyn Cross has survived as the Obsidian Hegemony’s most reliable instrument the only way a captive genius can — by measuring everything, trusting no one, and lining up her vials until the panic recedes. For three years she has hidden microscopic mercies inside catastrophic lies, quietly gutting the Weave.
Then the empire delivers a new specimen to her sterile white lab: Kaelen Vane, the captured rebel leader whose curse detonates when he loses control — a power aimed, by cruel design, at the one person he would die to protect. When Vaelen orders her to harvest Kaelen’s brain, Evelyn makes the first uncalculated decision of her life. She will free him instead.
His body is failing on a clock measured in days, the empire’s eye is narrowing to a single point, and buried in Evelyn’s own engineered blood is a secret that rewrites everything — her blood is the only thing that can permanently cure the curse killing him.
Alternating First Person (Evelyn & Kaelen) • HEA
Book Three — Echoes of Star and Stone (Aria & Zane)
“She carries the only cure in the galaxy. He is the feral, cursed half of the lock that can deploy it — and the only torment her touch can silence.”
Aria Sterling has spent her whole life as an imperial archivist, knowing the world only from a distance, through glass. Now she is falling out of the sky toward Elora, a beautiful and lethal moon of acid rain and razor-moss, with the only cure in the galaxy pressed cold against her breastbone and Vaelen’s voice promising mercy if she will only hand it back. She refuses. She crashes.
Then a feral, cursed scout finds her — Zane, half-wild with a sensory scream no one has ever been able to quiet, who cannot speak but carves. At her first touch, the curse falls silent. It has never fallen silent before. The truth surfaces from three thousand years underground: his curse is the mended half of an ancient paired key, and her blood is the lock.
As they cross the wild toward the Starlight temple, an archivist who loves by reciting and a scout who loves by carving learn to read each other’s languages — while Vaelen’s lattice closes in and the moon keeps finding new ways to kill them.
Alternating First Person (Aria & Zane) • HEA
Throughout All Three Books
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$364 (R6,000) $182 (R3,000)
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