Starforged Oath (Starforged Cycle)
The war is over. The Starforge fronts have gone quiet, the bowls have been scrubbed clean, and the priests swear the god's books are balanced.
They're lying.
Kael Renn-Witness, professional miracle-skeptic, and the man who once refused to sign off on a massacre-has traded trenches for city streets. Now he's supposed to certify tame little blessings: good harvests, clean water, protective wards that definitely don't liquefy anyone.
Then the ghosts start showing up.
A boy choking on river water in the middle of a dry lane. A woman clawing at a phantom arrow no one else can see. Whole districts waking with someone else's worst day jammed into their bones. Each haunting points to the same truth: for years, the god that runs the corrections has been shuffling costs, hiding the blood-price of miracles in places no one was meant to look.
The war's "necessary sacrifices" were only the beginning. The ledger of the dead is out of balance, and it's coming due.
Dragged into investigating "anomalies," Kael finds patterns the Halls don't want named:
Miracles quietly re-routed to protect estates and hurt the poorBowls that remember being told to take more than they were owedHis own name and his friends' marked as resistant variables-problems to be fixedHe's not alone. With him are:
Arien, the star-marked presence in his head: knife, compass, and terrible back-seat commentatorLys, a princess doing politics with a sword in one hand and doctrine in the otherBeneth, a clerk who thought "public service" meant taxes, not arguing theology with ghostsA handful of exhausted soldiers and mages who are far too invested in not being written off as "acceptable loss"Together, they realise the hauntings aren't random. They're evidence. Every echo is a line item the Audit tried to bury. Every apparition is a place where someone cooked the books.
If they can follow the ghosts back far enough, they might prove:
Who decided which valleys were worth savingHow many "acts of god" were really acts of policyAnd just how much of the god's justice is built on convenient liesBut the more they tug on the threads, the harder the system pulls back. Bowls turn hostile. Prelates whisper about purges. And the god-accountant starts sharpening its red ink.
Kael can't fight a divine Audit with steel. He can't send the ghosts neatly back to sleep. What he can do is the thing he's always done: write down what really happened and refuse to sign the lie.
If they succeed, they'll force the system to admit the dead were cheated-and open the way for a different kind of miracle, one that asks before it takes.
If they fail, the fastest way to "correct" the mess will be simple:
Erase the people asking questions.
LEDGER OF GHOSTS is Book Two of the Starforged Cycle, a character-driven epic fantasy about hauntings, bad bookkeeping, and the stubborn, mouthy mortals who insist that the cost of a miracle should never be a surprise.
Ghosts as receipts for stolen livesFound-family banter in the middle of supernatural horrorPolitical maneuvering between crowns, Halls, and a god that does not like being auditedSwordplay, ruined shrines, and the slow, furious work of dragging buried costs into the lightFor readers who like their fantasy sharp, emotional, and just a little bit obsessed with who gets written into the margins-and who doesn't.
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