The Crystal Pyre

For readers of Travis Baldree, T. Kingfisher, and Shelley Parker-Chan.

Niara is the rebellion's most effective commander. She plans with surgical precision, reads a room the way others read maps, and has not felt anything in three months - because she sold it. A transaction with a creature called the Merchant stripped away every shred of her own emotional experience in exchange for the one thing the rebellion needed: a Siphon who could stand at the heart of the King's suppression machine without flinching.

The King has ruled for forty years by controlling feeling itself. His Suppressor towers dose the population with chemical calm. His Vault holds four decades of stolen joy, grief, and love in crystal chambers a hundred feet below the Capital. And the only way to break it open is to stand at the convergence point and let all of it pass through you.

Niara is perfectly built for this. She no longer minds.

What she hadn't planned for is Kaelen - former enforcer, complicated person, the man she once loved and now only recognizes as data - choosing to stay at her side anyway. Not to fix her. Not to restore what was taken. Just because he wants to be there.

The Crystal Pyre is a slow-burn epic fantasy about the gap between knowing a thing and feeling it, the cost of necessary sacrifices, and what it means to rebuild yourself in the middle of a war. It is about a woman learning to trust the evidence of small true things, and a man patient enough to keep providing them.