Heart of The Shadows: Fracture Fate: 1

Something is stirring beneath the world. It has waited five hundred years, and all it needs is for one frightened person to say yes. Velana comes home to Eryndal and finds the rot already inside the walls. In the Bottom, by the black river, the poor are being offered a gift no one should take: power, for free, now - and a thread that never lets go. A fallen noble with nothing left to lose, a scholar who prices every spell in blood, an orphan whose scars can smell the corruption coming: they are all that stands between a dying city and the thing that speaks through the mouths of the grafted. Its name, when it finally chooses one, is the Herald. Six defenders against three hundred. An oath paid in a single life. And a wound torn in the sky that no sacrifice can close. The siege can be survived. It's the price no one has read to the end. Book 1 of 7 - the complete Heart of the Shadows saga.