The Chronicles of Dalibor Series
Every ten years, the Kingdom of Oruhan holds a competition for two open positions in the Royal Guard. Thirty young people compete. Two win. The rest are sent to the Pit at the center of the continent, where the fire barriers that have held the darkness back for three thousand years are beginning to thin.
Lidia Sattari has three months to win the competition. She is the daughter of a stablemaster and a kitchen worker, and she has nothing to sponsor her but an ability to fight that her father should not have been able to teach her. She has a debt her family will never pay off. And the competition is her only chance at freedom.
But there is more than a competition unfolding in the castle at Amberfell. Powers are being stripped from the nobility one by one. A queen has been dead twenty-three years, and the king who mourns her has begun to hear voices from a place he should not be listening to. In the floor of Lidia’s quarters, hidden inside a knot only an Elatian would know how to tie, waits a diary that was never meant to be found.
And somewhere in a kingdom that fell before Lidia was born, a decision was made at a gate that has been shaping every hour of her life without her knowing.
Meet Lidia Sattari
She is a kitchen girl with a sharp tongue and a debt that grows faster than she can pay it. She has been fired four times. She has been told to stay small for as long as she can remember. And she has been taught, quietly, by candlelight, to read in a language no one is supposed to know she speaks.
She has no magic in a world that measures worth by it. She has an ability to fight that her father should not have been able to teach her, and a competition she is not meant to survive. She enters anyway, because it is the only door the world has ever left open.
Her whole character, in one line: she got up, cleaned her hands on her pants, and tried again.
Meet Caleb Crellet
He was born on the day his mother died, and his father has not forgiven him for it in twenty-three years. Every year the kingdom mourns its queen on his birthday. Every year, only one person in the castle remembers to bake him a cake.
He is the golden prince, gentle in a house that punishes gentleness. He plays piano in empty rooms and writes letters he is too afraid to send. He is a far better fighter than he lets anyone see, and he hides it for reasons that will cost him.
He is about to fall in love with the worst possible person, in the worst possible place, at the worst possible time.
At Its Heart
Silence and What Survives It
A story about the things we're taught not to say, the truths held for decades, and what it costs to finally speak them.
Inherited Grief, Chosen Family
About the weight we carry from the people who came before us, and the family we build to help us carry it.
The Cost of Yes
About being told no your whole life, and deciding to say yes anyway, no matter what it burns down.
What They Took From the People
About power stolen so quietly that its victims never knew it was theirs to begin with. About the lies a ruling class tells to stay on top, and what happens in the hundredth generation, when the story they built finally starts to crack.
The Cost of Conquest
A continent taken by outsiders, and a people robbed of what made them who they were. About colonization not as a single act of violence, but as a theft that keeps taking, generation after generation, long after anyone remembers it happened.
A Debt Built to Never Be Paid
About a labor system engineered so the people inside it can never climb out. Inspired by the debt bondage that replaced slavery in Brazil, it asks who a society decides to keep at the bottom, and what it tells them to keep them there.
