The sundered seal
The Sundered Seal
Book One of The Abyss Chronicles
For ten thousand years, the abyss was only a bedtime story. Dragons, wyverns, and things with voices that shake the earth were myths told to frighten children into behaving.
Then a man in plain grey clothes broke the seal.
Veyrath is forgettable to look at and terrifying to know. To fulfil an ideology no one else can bear to hear, he unleashed the creatures of the abyss and spread a curse that turns humans into mindless, murderous abominations. Worse, he cannot be killed, because hundreds of his clones are hidden across the world, each one as powerful as the original.
In the quiet valley of Dawnhollow, twins Kaelen and Lyra have just turned twenty-one. She is a prodigy of the wind and the second rank. He is the first Ascendant the settlement has seen in living memory, with a golden light that heals instead of destroys. When the first monster comes over the wall wearing a shepherd's coat, Kaelen sees a frightened human face beneath the ruin, and he learns his gift can undo the curse.
But every cure leaves a mark on him. Each life he saves pulls him a little closer to becoming the thing he is trying to reverse.
As the dragons turn out to be prisoners of the same sickness, and Veyrath climbs to a rank no one thought possible, the twins must lead a hopeless war with only each other to hold on to.
Some monsters can be healed. Some can only be fought. And the hardest part may be knowing which is which.
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Chapter: Chapter Fifteen: Immortal clonesThey reached Brackwater a little before dawn, and the river was already burning. It was not fire in the ordinary sense. As Kaelen and Lyra swept down out of the dark, they saw that the two streams meeting at the town's spit of land had turned a sullen, oily grey, and that a low mist was rising off the water, thick and iron-scented, creeping up the terraces in slow white fingers. Wherever it touched, the lamps went out. Along the barricade, the defenders were coughing and stumbling, rubbing at their eyes, and on the far bank, in the shadow of the market island, a great mass of shapes was wading through the shallows with their yellow eyes fixed on the drawn-up bridge. "There must be three hundred of them," Lyra said, her voice sharp with shock. "Kaelen, they have never come in numbers like this." "They are not hunting." Kaelen's gaze was fixed on the centre of the crowd. "They are escorting." He was right. At the heart of the host, walking calmly through the grey water with his hand
Last Updated: 2026-10-31
Chapter: Chapter Fourteen: The Truth of the curse The east postern of Valdris was a narrow iron door set into the foot of the outer wall, so low that a tall man would have to stoop to pass through it. At dusk, as the last light drained out of the sky, it opened a hand's breadth, and a pale face looked out. "You came," whispered the young woman in the grey cloak. "I was not certain you would." "We nearly did not," said Lyra. "Your captain was very persuasive." "He is afraid. They are all afraid." She glanced over her shoulder, then pulled the door wide. "Quickly. Before the patrol returns." Her name was Isaura Venn, and she was twenty-six years old, and she was one of the only two Ascendants in the Citadel. Her gift was warding, the weaving of invisible walls out of will and breath, and it was by threading a thin ward across the corridor behind her that she bought them a quarter of an hour of privacy in the damp stone passage beyond the postern. She did not waste a moment of it. "Lord Castellan Voll has lost his mind," she said,
Last Updated: 2026-10-31
Chapter: Chapter Thirteen: A TruceThe shadow did not belong to a cloud. It lay across the foothills like a great black sail, and as Kaelen and Lyra hung motionless in the air above it, the sky itself seemed to ripple, the way the air shivers over a baker's oven. Then the shimmer thinned, and a shape condensed out of it, slow and enormous and terribly quiet. Vorthak, First of the Ashen Brood, had been flying above them the whole time. He was even larger than Kaelen remembered. His wings, spread wide, covered half the foothills, and the molten veins beneath his iron-black scales pulsed in slow rhythm, like a banked forge. But something was different. The great horned head was lowered, and the burning eyes were half lidded, and the voice that had thundered over Dawnhollow like a landslide now came soft and deliberate, as though each word cost him effort. "You may lower your hands, daughter of the wind," said the dragon. "If I wished you dead, you would have been ash before you saw my shadow." Lyra did not lower them
Last Updated: 2026-10-31
Chapter: Chapter Twelve: The journey to the settlementsThey left Dawnhollow on the ninth morning, before the sun had cleared the eastern hills. It had taken that long to arrange. Dorran had argued against it from his sickbed, in a voice so thin that even he seemed embarrassed by it, and Brenna Voss had argued against it more loudly, standing at the foot of his bed with her arms folded and her jaw set. In the end it was Pell the miller who settled the matter, in his heavy, unhurried way. "Dawnhollow has food for a month and walls for a week," he said. "We cannot outlast this alone. If there are others still standing, we need them, and they will not come for a letter carried by a frightened rider. They will come for the Ascendant." So the twins went. They went lightly, because they could fly, and because a cart or a column would have been slaughtered on the roads. Each carried a single pack: dried meat, water skins, a bundle of clean linen, and a sealed scroll bearing the lantern sigil of Dawnhollow. Lyra wore her green cloak and the si
Last Updated: 2026-10-31
Chapter: Chapter Eleven: Lyra's vowVeyrath's three days came and went, and he did not return. It should have been a relief. The watchmen on the northern wall stared into the mist each dawn with their spears ready and their stomachs knotted, and each dawn the pasture lay empty except for the usual shambling grey shapes, which were fewer now and wandering aimlessly, as though whatever had commanded them had lost interest. Brenna Voss said it was a blessing. Pell the miller said it was a mercy. Lyra said nothing at all, because she had learned in the last week that the quietest moments were the ones to fear, and that a patient man could afford to let his enemy rest. She had barely slept since the morning her father collapsed. Dorran lay in his own bed in the great house on the Hill of Lanterns, propped against a bank of pillows, with a bowl of broth cooling untouched on the table beside him. The healers swore that the curse was gone from him entirely. His veins ran red, his eyes were clear, and the grey had faded from
Last Updated: 2026-10-31
Chapter: Chapter Ten: The Cost: The Curse Touches His Skin Wen Fenwick was the first, but he was not the last. Word of what Kaelen had done spread through Dawnhollow before the sun was fully up. It travelled from the guards at the cellar door to the watchmen on the wall, from the watchmen to the refugees sleeping in the square, and from the refugees to every corner of the settlement, growing and glittering as it went. By noon, people were saying that the Ascendant could raise the dead. By evening, they were saying that he could not be harmed. By the following morning, a crowd had gathered at the doors of the Hall of Rank, and it was growing larger by the hour. Kaelen had not asked for any of it. He had slept four hours, sprawled on a cot in the healers' room with his boots still on. When he woke, there was a queue at the cellar stairs. Brenna Voss's patrols had caught three more creatures overnight, using the same pit traps and iron chains, and the guards, trembling and hopeful, had brought them down one by one to wait in the dark. "I ca
Last Updated: 2026-10-19
