The Sovereign's Flame: The Chronicle of Aetherion
Seraphine Ashveil, a healer's daughter from a quiet provincial village, who has spent eight years quietly angry at the God she calls the Sovereign - ever since He failed to answer her prayers and let her deeply faithful mother die of shadow-sickness. She believes in Him the way one believes in a locked door: He is real, He is there, and she is not going in.
That changes the night Shadow Wraiths destroy her village's gate and she finds herself kneeling at the town fountain, out of options, praying the most honest and clumsy prayer of her life - and the Sovereign's fire moves through her and drives the darkness back. The Order of the Eternal Flame arrives minutes later, led by Captain Caelum Dawnrider: a warrior whose twelve-year faith has been quietly broken by a mission that killed seven men and left him alive, and who has been keeping everyone at a carefully managed distance ever since.
Over the following year, the two of them travel a world being consumed by the patient, intelligent campaign of Malchar the Sundered - the ancient fallen being who was once the most glorious of the Sovereign's angelic host and who chose pride over love and has been extinguishing the seven Luminary Trees, the anchors of divine light in the world, one by one for three thousand years. Seraphine must learn to hold her gift, rebuild her trust in the Sovereign, and ultimately make a complete surrender of everything she carries back to the One who gave it - with no guarantee she will survive the giving.
At its heart the novel is about two people learning, by different roads, the same thing: that faith is not the absence of fear or the feeling of certainty, but a repeated decision about the Sovereign's character - made in shadow fortresses and mountain passes and ordinary cottage gardens and at the roots of ancient trees. And that love, far from being the thing that compromises a calling, is what makes it possible to go through with it at all.
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