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The Ember Oath: A Romantasy Novel
Paperback
Series: Ashfall Academy, Book 1
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 28 2026
Pages: 268
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The empire built the wall. Her brother is on the other side of it - and Lyra Vessren is going to find him, even if she has to bring the whole cliff down to do it.
Five years ago, the empire told Lyra her brother died in a border accident. Then it mailed his cloak home, professionally cleaned and mended - the clumsy fishing-line stitches he'd sewn himself picked out and redone by a stranger's hand.
You don't wash a dead man's cloak.
You wash evidence.
Now twenty years old and armed with a lifetime of pretending to be no one, Lyra has walked five hundred miles up the Ember Road to enrol at Ashfall Academy - the imperial military school where her brother was last alive, where the archives hold the file the empire's condolence letter was written to bury, and where the wrong question, asked in the wrong room, gets a girl drowned.
She means to keep her head down, break into the archive, learn the truth, and vanish.
She did not count on the squad who quietly decided she belongs to them - a Pyrrhan noble who runs the wrong way down a course just to finish it beside her, a healer who hears her coastal vowels and says nothing, a silent giant who will tear a mountain open before he lets anyone touch his own. She did not count on Captain Kaelen Draeve, the academy's coldest officer, a man who carries out the empire's worst orders and who looks at her, across a training yard and a library and a courtyard in the snow, like she's the one who found him out.
And she did not count on the power waking under her ribs - the fifth element the empire has spent six centuries erasing from every book, the reason it takes bonded children at eleven and sends their cloaks home clean. The thing her brother had.
The thing that got him killed.
As the academy's deadliest winter closes in and an administrator's soft-voiced threat reaches five hundred miles to a cottage by the sea, Lyra learns the empire's oldest secret: the sea it swears is empty is not empty at all. There is a world beyond the wall. And the dead it drowns for being born wrong do not always stay dead.
THE EMBER OATH is the first book in the Ashfall Academy trilogy - a slow-burn fantasy romance for readers who love:
- A dark magical academy with real teeth and a body count
- A guarded, morally grey love interest and a slow burn that earns every inch
- A found-family squad you would die for by the last page
- Buried magic, an empire built on a lie, and a heroine done being invisible
- A world that opens wider with every chapter - and a final page that changes everything
Not hiding again. Not alone again. Not silent again.
One-click and cross the Veil.
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