: Elowen Voss
: Whispers of the Shadow Throne A Dark Fae King Fantasy Romance
: Publishdrive
: 9781105424854
: 1
: CHF 6.00
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 406
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

She was summoned without her consent. But she's choosing to stay.


Ysolde Carath is a mortal Dusk-Walker who has spent eight years guiding souls through the Veil at the Dominion's border. When a fae king's ward-claim pulls her across the boundary stones without explanation, she arrives in a kingdom held together by something that was never supposed to last this long: a thousand-year-old throne built on the bones of pressed and borrowed dead. The fracture in its seam has been growing for forty years. The grey districts have been spreading for months. And Morthyn Askarath, the last of his dynasty— four centuries old, twenty-three dead kings living in his skull, marks running jaw to collarbone— has known exactly who she is and what her Gift can do for far longer than she has been in his kingdom.


He is controlled. Precise. Managing everything, including himself, with the four-century discipline of a man who learned that anything less would cost him. She is furious, direct, and constitutionally incapable of accepting a managed version of the truth when the real one is available. What happens between them— in an archive at midnight, in the dark of a shadow-transit, on the floor of a throne hall at the second bell— was never supposed to happen. The working that will save his kingdom requires a bond that cannot be undone. He will lose everything that has defined him. She already knows. She is choosing it anyway.


Because the choice is not simply hers. And the fury is still present. And the Veil-Bond cannot be formed by proximity, by accident, or by anything other than will directed with full awareness of what it means.


They have five days.


Whispers of the Shadow Throne is a standalone dark fae king romantasy for readers who want their slow burn built on mutual precision, their banter to have teeth, and their happy ending fully earned through every ounce of the cost.

CHAPTER 1


The merchant was not going to make it through the hour, and he knew it, and the knowing was making everything considerably more difficult.

Ysolde knelt beside him on the flagstones of the Ashen Markets — the grey-worn trading square that occupied the particular nowhere between the living world and the Umbral Dominion, where the borders thinned enough that the two could conduct commerce without anyone having to formally acknowledge the other's existence. The merchant's stall had collapsed sideways into its neighbour's, scattering bolts of shadow-silk across the ground in long dark ribbons, deep blue-black against the pale stone. No one around them was helping. This was not cruelty; it was the specific etiquette of the Markets, where everyone understood that when a Dusk-Walker appeared, you moved away and you let them work.

She pressed two fingers against the inside of the merchant's wrist. His pulse was there — thin, irregular, already beginning its retreat, the way tide pulls back before it stops altogether. He had the particular quality of the almost-dead: the eased lines, the faint translucency at the edges, the subtle light that gathered at his skin not from any external source but from the Veil pressing through him like sunlight through old parchment.

"How long?" he asked. His voice was fae-deep even now, resonant in the way of things that had been alive long enough to grow into the register of old wood and running water. His name, the neighbouring stall-keeper had told her in a quick, low murmur, was Vaethen. He had traded at the Markets for sixty years. He had a daughter who kept a stall in the eastern quarter of Vaethmor and would need to be told.

"I'm not going to lie to you about that," she said.

"Good." He closed his eyes. His hands were folded in his lap with the particular deliberateness of someone who has decided this is where they will be."My people — they don't do this. What you do. They say the dead of the Dominion go to the Throne, and the Throne—"

"I know what they say." She kept her voice even. She kept it even the way she kept her hands steady during a crossing, with conscious, continuous effort that became unconscious through repetition and was no less effort for that."But you're not at the Dominion's border right now. You're at mine. Different rules."

He almost smiled."Your rules are better?"

"My rules are simpler." She shifted her weight and settled properly — both knees on the cold flagstone, both hands placed flat against his chest where the pulse was weakest and the Veil-light was brightest. Around them, the Markets had created a small silence, the nearest stalls going quiet and still, the way water draws back from a stone when you lower it in. People gave death its space at the Ashen Markets. They understood, here, that it was simply another transaction."I'm going to open the Veil. You'll feel it as a kind of quiet — not silence exactly, more like the moment just before snow falls, when the air changes and the world holds itself still. When you feel that, walk toward it. Don't hesitate."

"How will I know—"

"You'll know." She had said this eight hundred times. She said it with the same certainty every time, because the certainty was what they needed and the certainty was also, as it happened, true. Whatever else she could claim about her Silence-Gift — however unreliable it had been at sixteen, at the worst possible moment, when her mother had been the one lying pale and too-still in the border healer's room — it had never once failed to show a willing soul the way.

She breathed in slowly and let the Gift unspool.

This was the part she had no language for, because the experience of it was deeply interior in a way that resisted description, and she had long since stopped trying to describe it to anyone who hadn't been born Veilborn. It felt like opening a door, if the door were inside her chest and opened into somewhere that was everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, and the air on the other side was the specific temperature of a held breath finally released. She held the Veil open with a focused, patient effort — the way you hold a window against a rising wind, muscles steady, attention absolute — and let the stillness spread outward through her hands, through his chest, into the air around them both.

Vaethen went quiet.<