The Hollow Seal

The gods fell twelve hundred years ago. The world has been mining their corpses ever since.

Magic comes from god-marrow — and marrow is running out. Crops fail. Winters lengthen. Children are born without shadows. The Church of the Nine Interments has one answer: resurrect a god, whatever it costs. Whoever it costs.

Maren Kest’s mother burned in the village square when Maren was nine — and traded everything she had so her daughter could stand in the crowd and watch, and feel nothing anyone could see. That was the inheritance. Some daughters got looms. Because Maren is a Hollow: born sealless, able to tear magic from a living bearer with one touch, and the Church burns Hollows in their cradles. So Maren counts exits, mends wards, carries a single horn button from a burned coat — and performs ordinary like her life depends on it. It does.

Then the inquisition arrives with her mother’s reopened file, and in one catastrophic public moment, Maren steals her first seal — from a vein that shouldn’t exist, carrying the memories of a god who was never buried with the rest.

Now the Church’s finest Hollow-hunter is on her trail — a true believer whose own borrowed god is eating him alive. A bankrupt prince has found his family’s oldest ledger, and the debt in it has his ancestors’ knives all over it. And in the dark beneath the Sundering Sea, something that has waited twelve centuries has finally heard a door open.

The dead god in her head keeps saying she’s the key to everything.

It’s lying about which side of the lock she’s on.

Book one of THE SUNDERED NINE. For readers of dark epic fantasy, hard magic systems, hunter-and-hunted tension, and endings you don’t see coming. Complete trilogy roadmap — no abandoned series.