The Red Path Below

The Ash Roads have split open, exposing a buried kingdom sealed beneath black stone and centuries of silence. Its red halls awaken at Jyllithea's touch. Ancient doors answer her blood, forgotten inscriptions name a lineage she was never meant to inherit, and deep below the ruins waits a black-glass heart built to turn living flame into a weapon. She is not the only one drawn underground. Princes arrive with legal seals and soldiers. Priests conceal ledgers that record generations of forbidden bloodlines. Scholars catalogue the gifted as if people were relics, while Cala Sorn offers protection wrapped in obligations no one survives unchanged. Each faction claims the ruins for a different future, and each believes Jyllithea belongs at its center. Armed with Emberclaw, a leather bracer set with a living bloodscale, Jyllithea follows the red paths toward the truth of her ancestry. But old family lies fracture her trust, the buried city begins to wake, and innocent lives become bargaining pieces in a struggle for ownership of her power. To keep anyone from claiming her blood, she may have to destroy the only place that can explain who she is. The Red Paths Below descends into a world of political intrigue, ancient inheritance, and the fire waiting beneath every secret.