the broken sigil
chronicles continue

Before the choosing

Tamsin Ashvane has spent eleven years making sure no one ever learns what she is.

In Rootholm’s infirmary, she’s just an apothecary, steady hands, quiet reputation, a locked door around the one thing she buried the day it first surfaced. Then a dying prince is carried through that door, and the power she’s spent a lifetime containing answers a call she never gave it. The tower comes down in cold blue fire. She’s the only one left standing.

She wakes days later in a forest refuge under a stolen name, with someone else’s notebooks, a village that’s learned not to ask questions, and a masked stranger who knew exactly who she was before she said a word.

But the hunters closing in weren’t chasing a runaway apothecary. They were tracking the thing inside her, and the fire at Rootholm wasn’t the only time it’s woken up on its own.

The man in the obsidian mask says he can teach her to aim it. To decide, for the first time, who lives and who doesn’t.

The alternative is standing in the wreckage of the next thing she never meant to do.

Before the Choosing is a grimdark fantasy novella for readers who want their healers competent, their magic costly, and their found families built on secrets nobody’s ready to spend.