New Avalon was built on necessary things.
Beneath its shining dome, weather is regulated, transit runs on time, and magick has been licensed into something safe enough to trust. Citizens go to work, fall in love, complain about utility rates, and believe that the systems protecting them were built by people they could forgive.
Alise Zandeveau believes that too.
A gifted sigil engineer at Aetherdyne, Alise has spent her career helping refine the very wards that keep civilization running. She believes institutions can be improved from within, that decent people working patiently in difficult places can bend the machinery of the world toward mercy.
Then a routine investigation leads her to a burned alley in Lower Vire, impossible symbols etched into melted stone, and a secret buried beneath the city itself.
The truth is older than New Avalon.
A captive dragon-heart beats beneath its foundations.
The city's prosperity rests upon bargains no one alive remembers making.
And the people sworn to protect civilization may be willing to sacrifice anyone necessary to preserve it.
Joined by a warlock with too many regrets, a professor whose love has always been tangled with betrayal, an edge-town mechanic who trusts ugly solutions more than elegant lies, and a sharp-tongued familiar drone incapable of minding its own business, Alise must decide what she owes the city she once loved-and what she refuses to spend in order to save it.
Because some debts survive the people who create them.
And when every choice demands a cost, the most dangerous question is not what we're willing to sacrifice.
It's who.
Under the Ember Moon is a sweeping urban fantasy about love, memory, found family, institutional compromise, and the ordinary acts of care that become revolutionary in a world built on hidden debts. Perfect for readers who enjoy morally complex fantasy with romantic elements, layered worldbuilding, and characters who choose one another even when the cost is unbearable.
