The Unbroken Line: Book 1 The First Irregularity

Caelan Dressler has one job at his own Awakening: stand still, manifest a thin, unremarkable trickle of his family's storm magic, and spend the rest of his life being nobody's first choice for anything. He's had twenty-one years of practice at being unremarkable. He's quite good at it.

Then the candles go out. All of them, at once, in a chapel that's hosted four centuries of identical, forgettable ceremonies without incident, and the Concord's sacred Ledger, the four-hundred-year-old instrument that quite literally writes down who gets to love whom, starts bleeding ink into a shape no clergyman in the room has a name for.

Caelan didn't ask for any of this. He was thinking about bread.

What actually happened is older and considerably more dangerous than anyone in the room understands: for the first time in five hundred years, a god heard someone, briefly, accidentally, without even noticing he'd done it, wonder why loving one person was ever supposed to be the only acceptable arithmetic. Yssara, goddess of sex, revelry, luck and abundance, banished and erased by an empire built entirely on contracts, ledgers, and exact accounting, has been waiting five centuries for exactly that question. She's not waiting anymore.

Now Caelan is building something his empire has no box for, a household, then a following, then something that's starting to look uncomfortably like a church, out of nothing but bad jokes, genuine kindness, and a complete inability to take his own escalating danger seriously. Every person who joins him freely, by real choice rather than command, makes him stronger in ways he doesn't understand and isn't in a hurry to examine. The women building this with him are not decoration: a widow done with being managed by men who call it protection, a noblewoman who burned her own betrothal contract rather than keep performing gratitude for it, a performer carrying a debt only she knows the weight of, and a goddess who hasn't laughed like this in five hundred years and has absolutely no intention of being subtle about how much she's enjoying it.

Meanwhile, the empire is noticing. An inquisitor who came expecting a simple case is finding records that don't match the doctrine she's spent her career believing. A regional power structure built on scarcity is about to meet the one household in four centuries built on the opposite idea entirely. And somewhere above all of it, older gods who haven't bothered with mortal affairs in centuries are about to discover there's finally something worth paying attention to again.

Can a faith of abundance survive in an empire built on scarcity?

Caelan would honestly rather not find out today. He's got toast.