Ash & Altar

The empire burns its witches on seventeen altars.Sera Voss has spent three years hiding in the underground city beneath the Sanctum's white towers, dying by degrees - a black death-mark spreading toward her heart, the last curse on the last of a hunted bloodline. Her only hope is the Ashbone Key, a relic locked in the empire's deepest vault, warded by two kinds of magic that have been enemies for two centuries.To open it, she needs a holy warrior.Kael Dawnveil was forged by the Sanctum - fourth-ranked, ruthless, the most effective weapon the empire has produced in a generation. He was sent to the underground to find the Key, find the girl, and do what warrior-priests do.He was not sent to stay.But something happens when Sera's forbidden magic reaches for his holy fire: it doesn't recoil. It reaches back. And the secret locked inside Kael's blood - suppressed since birth, wrongly named his entire life - is exactly the other half of what the vault requires.Two bloodlines the empire tore apart.One relic that could bring the altars down.Ash & Altar is a dark, enemies-to-lovers romantasy about grief as power, the cost of certainty, and two people who were built to destroy each other choosing, with full knowledge of what it means, to burn together instead.