The Necromancer's Blood Moon
She was born to be a sacrifice. She refuses to be a martyr.
Evelyn Arden has spent twenty years making herself small-smiling at suitors, yielding every argument, counting the days until she might simply exist. Then the Blood Moon rises over Thornhelm, and a crescent of black-red thorns blooms across her throat. The mark of the Chosen. Once every hundred years, one soul is given to keep Nyxareth, the Devourer Beneath, locked behind its seal. The Order of Dawnlight calls it a mercy. Evelyn calls it murder-and she has fourteen days to prove there is another way.
In a stolen book of forbidden lore, she finds it: a binding of souls that might satisfy the seal without ending a life. There is only one man alive who could attempt it, and he lives beyond the edge of the map, in the black-stone fortress of Duskmere Keep, in the cursed marshes of the Hollow Reach.
Darian Blackwood is a necromancer two hundred and fourteen years old, a man whose heart was carved out and buried where no god could reach it, whom an entire continent believes incapable of tenderness. He does not want a guest. He certainly does not want a bargain that demands the one thing he buried with his heart. But Evelyn is the first person in two centuries to look at him and not flinch-and some doors, once opened, cannot be closed again.
At her side, and sometimes in her way: Bram Coldwell, Darian's dry-tongued gravekeeper, who has long since given up on his lord's charm; and Mira Fenwick, Evelyn's childhood friend turned witch hunter, who risks everything the Inquisition ever gave her to look the other way.
Against them stands High Inquisitor Marcus Thane-brilliant, patient, and utterly devout. He believes the Choosing protects the innocent. He has also spent twenty years in private research, and he knows something the Church does not about the bloodline that sealed the Devourer nine hundred years ago. Evelyn's sacrifice is not just a ritual to him. It is the key to everything he has planned, and he will march an army into the Hollow Reach to see it completed.
In a kingdom that turned its worst horror into a bedtime story, love is the most dangerous heresy of all. And the dead, beneath a bleeding moon, are already listening.
If you love: forbidden romance, morally gray necromancers, chosen-one sacrifice, and gothic dark fantasy with real stakes - this is your next read.
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