Xanthe Voss has spent her entire life outrunning her blood. The last descendant of the Veldrath Coven ,the death-witches who once stood between the living world and Duskholm as wardens of the ancient dead , she has buried her power beneath ordinary things: dried herbs, cloudy windows, a flat full of books she uses to drown out the whispers. She does not practice. She does not reach back toward the dark. She survives by being forgettable. Then the mark appears on her arm, and a god sends someone to her door. Etienne is Morthane's Blade ,a dark fae general old enough to have watched civilisations collapse, bound by oath to the God of Death and Debt. He does not feel things. He does not hesitate. He has been sent to keep Xanthe alive, because something older than Morthane is hunting the last of her bloodline, and the balance between Solmere and Duskholm is fracturing at the seams. He was not sent to want her. But her blood carries the scent of his world, and every moment in her presence tightens something he stopped believing he was capable of feeling centuries ago. She is his assignment. He is her cage. And the dark keeps everything it is owed

He came into the room with the look of a man who just gambled away his inheritance,ordered a jack and coke on the rocks and just sat there stirring into space. Atlas couldn't have come close to holding the weight of the world on his shoulders like he did,i felt pity for him. I asked him his name, he insisted it was nothing worth remembering,he said at one point he had one,now he is not sure of who he is. He had a tale to tell,i had the ears to listen and what he told me,i have not yet been able to recount to anybody else but i will try to the best of my recollection.He told me a story I still haven’t been able to forget. A love that lit him up and burned him down all at once. She was everything and losing her cracked something in him that never healed. What he remembers of her comes in flashes. Laughter in a storm Her hand pulling his back from the edge. The way she said his name like it meant something.A thousand memories. None of them enough to bring her back.