Novels by Akavia Faraz

Axton woke to the smell of burning.Not fire. Something worse. Chemical. Like someone had tried to cook metal and given up halfway through.He sat up fast. Too fast. His head spun and his ribs screamed and every muscle in his body reminded him that yesterday he'd fought three cultivators and barely survived.The room was empty. Kael was gone. The candle had burned out. Gray morning light filtered through cracks in the painted window.The smell was getting stronger.Axton rolled off the cot. His legs almost gave out. The Aegis burn from last night was worse than he'd expected. Using blue mode had cost something. His cultivation pathways, the channels that carried Qi through the body, felt raw. Oversensitized. Like nerve endings after touching something too hot.He made it to the door. Listened.Voices downstairs. Kael's. Someone else. Male. Unfamiliar.Axton's hand went to his sleeve. The knife was there. Always there. He drew it. The dark blade caught what little light existed and see

The Bone Garden didn't look like a place where people buried their dead.It looked like a museum someone had forgotten to put a roof on.Axton stood at the entrance, iron gates twisted into shapes that might have been dragons or might have been decorative nonsense, and tried not to think about how exposed he felt. Three days of walking through a city that offered a million credits for his head. Three days of sleeping in alleys and stealing food from restaurant dumpsters and generally living like the world's worst-equipped fugitive.He'd made it. Somehow.The cemetery stretched north for maybe half a mile. Rows and rows of stone markers, most of them taller than he was. Cultivation families didn't do humble. Even in death they needed everyone to know they'd been important.The air tasted wrong. Like incense mixed with metal. Like someone had tried to cover up the smell of rust with flowers and given up halfway through.Axton walked.His feet crunched on gravel paths that wound between

The tunnels smelled like age and secrets.Not sewage this time. Something older. Stone that had been carved centuries ago by hands that understood cultivation and warfare in ways the modern world had forgotten. The walls were smooth, covered in symbols that glowed faintly blue, providing just enough light to see by.Kael moved through the darkness like he'd walked these passages a thousand times. Probably had. His sword was still drawn, gray smoke trailing from the blade like breath in winter.Behind them, the sound of pursuit. Footsteps. Voices. The Heptarchy champions weren't giving up."How far do these tunnels go?" Axton's voice echoed slightly despite his effort to whisper."Far enough. The Shadowvein Sect built them during the Divine-Mortal War. Escape routes. Supply lines. Burial chambers for cultivators who died protecting the city." Kael turned a corner without slowing. "Most people forgot they exist. The Heptarchy remembers. They'll search systematically. We have maybe twent

"Hit me," Kael said.Axton stared. "What?""You heard me. Full power. Everything you've got. Warborne legacy, black lightning, all of it." Kael Tornhart stood in the center of his impossible garden, hands clasped behind his back, looking like someone's grandfather about to teach them chess. "If you can land a single hit, I'll eat this moss.""I'll kill you.""You won't." Kael's smile was infuriating. Calm. Certain. "I fought your father to a standstill. Twice. You're not your father. Not yet. Maybe not ever. So stop wasting time and hit me."Axton's hands clenched. His body still ached from the sewer. From the altar. From everything. The power in his chest stirred, responding to his emotion.He threw a punch.Kael wasn't there anymore."Predictable," the old man's voice came from behind him. "Your body telegraphs intent three seconds before you move. Any cultivator above bronze rank sees you coming."Axton spun, kicked.Missed."Slow. Your father could cross twenty feet in a heartbeat

The sewers smelled like civilization's shame.Rot and rust and something chemical that burned the back of Axton's throat with every breath. His bare feet, he'd lost his shoes somewhere in the carnage, couldn't remember when, splashed through water he refused to think about. Cold. Viscous. The kind of liquid that carried diseases with names you didn't want to learn.Behind him, sirens wailed. Cultivator enforcement. The Sentinel Order, probably. They'd have tracked the spiritual disturbance at the Manor within minutes. A seal breaking released enough energy to light up every detection array in the city.Ahead, only darkness and the sound of water dripping from pipes that looked older than the buildings above them.Axton ran toward the darkness.His body protested every step. The power that had erupted at the altar had receded, but it left traces. His veins felt too hot. His skin too tight. Like he'd been wearing someone else's body and now his real one didn't quite fit anymore.The whi

The first day after the message, nothing changed.Axton went to school. Got shoved into lockers by people whose names he'd stopped learning. Bled quietly in bathroom stalls where the tiles were cracked and the mirrors reflected truths no one wanted to see. Came home to an empty room and dinner that had gone cold three hours before anyone remembered to send it up.The scar on his chest itched. A new one. He'd woken up with it that morning, right over his heart...thin, silver, shaped like a character from a language he didn't know but somehow understood meant war.He didn't show anyone. Didn't mention it. Just wrapped it in gauze and pretended the itch was ignorable.It wasn't.The second day, everything changed.It started with the library.Vail Manor had a library that most universities would envy...three floors of books and scrolls and cultivation manuals bound in leather that smelled like power and old violence. It was always locked. The kind of locked that came with arrays and ward