First Light Seven 1 - FIRST LIGHT SEVEN

A dead boy. A bucket full of mornings. A war between gods. He wakes in someone else's coffin, wearing someone else's death. Evander claws out of the dirt with three powers tangled in one hand—Genesis, Oblivion, Eon: creation, erasure, and time, all fighting for the same palm. He doesn't remember dying. He barely remembers living. What he does remember: six faces he was supposed to find. Six people he was supposed to protect. Six absences that ache like phantom limbs. That's the beginning. He emerges into Velithra—a village that exists only because its people refuse to stop believing. Here, an eight-hundred-year-old storyteller hides a hunger he won't name. A girl hears frequencies that would shatter anyone else. And a Parliament of cosmic absence has been filing reality into nothing for longer than memory. Behind all of it—underneath the village's impossible streets, woven through its crooked houses—is a secret older than the village itself. A Wager older than the universe. Two cosmic siblings, the Creator and the Brother, divided reality itself to prove whose philosophy was right—connection or isolation. And in the city of Aurelume, a man with a crystal hand has been enforcing the Brother's vision for three centuries. "I did not say it was kind," the man in the crystal tower tells him. "I said it was correct." To find the six people he can't stop searching for, Evander will have to answer one question—a question his power, which asks instead of commands, was never designed to face: What does it mean to help someone without asking first? The age of gods has ended. The age of fragments has begun. First Light Seven Book One is a literary dark fantasy about found family, the weight of choice, and the seven people who might just teach gods how to love. The Wager is not…