Bone & Ember - Ravyn Crowe

The boundary between the living and the dead is not a wall. It is a fire. And fires need tending.

For three hundred years, the fire in the hollow mountain burned - containing something ancient, something hungry, something the world had long since forgotten to fear. When it went out, the cold began to spread. And the people who might have stopped it were already gone.

The Burning World Series follows Mara Ashvane, Calder Voss, and Marisol - a gravedigger who speaks to the dead, a church investigator who has catalogued things that shouldn't exist, and a child who draws maps of places no one has charted - across a world where the boundary between the living and the dead is older than memory and more fragile than anyone wants to admit.

In Bone & Ember, the fire goes out and something crawls out of the mountain. Three strangers follow the cold toward its source - and find that stopping it will cost more than any of them expected.

In Bone & Ash, the fire is lit but the work is just beginning. The order of Keepers is rebuilding from nothing, the boundary is fragile, and something older than the Pale Hunger is waking in the east.

This is not a story about chosen ones. It is a story about the work - the slow, necessary, ongoing work of keeping the fire lit, passing the knowledge on, and trusting that the people who come after will be paying attention.

Dark fantasy for readers who like their dread quiet, their magic earned, and their endings honest.

The fire is still burning. For now.