AURORA

A luminous mythic love story for readers of Madeline Miller, Katherine Arden, and Erin Morgenstern. Before there were names, there was the dark. And in the dark, the Source left a single ember. From that ember rose Odara, the fire that cannot be extinguished — for each time she is put out, she is born again from her own ashes. Far above her drifts Yelvan, the Warden of the Wind: an invisible king who can prove he exists only by moving something else. Fire and air were never meant to meet. Yet when they do, the sky ignites into a light no being has ever seen — the light the ancient folk would come to call Aurora. But no flame burns unwatched. In the lightless pit below waits Obran, the Swallower — who does not hate the fire so much as he cannot bear that it exists. Embers are stolen. A will is tested. And a love that began as wonder must become something harder and truer: the courage to give without holding, to burn without owning, to let the beloved go free. Written in the cadence of an ancient scripture and the intimacy of a whispered fable, Aurora is both a sweeping cosmology and a mirror held up to the reader's own heart. It asks the oldest question in a new tongue: what does it mean to love a light without trying to keep it? Aurora is the first book of the Ancient Tongue Myths — a seven-part saga of the elements and their unions. This edition includes the complete forty-four Lamp Cards, a glossary of the ancient tongue, and a reader's companion for those who wish to carry the fire beyond the page. The first colour has burned. Six await. "If you are the one who makes the light, no one can put it out."