Deathless

Sorrel Wenlock is the passage-keeper of Coldharrow, the woman the cold fen towns send for when someone dies. She washes the body, finds the true name under the used one, and speaks the old rite that carries a soul through the last gate to rest. She has never been afraid of the dead; the dead are the one honest thing left in the world. Then her rite began to fail, and the souls she sent on were stolen from the road before they reached the gate.

When her dearest friend is murdered and her soul vanishes from under Sorrel’s hands in the middle of the rite, Sorrel does the thing her craft forbids. She walks the road of the dead alive, all the way to the Bone Gate, to accuse Death himself. The Keeper of the Deathless is everything the stories promise: cold, terrible, older than the oldest name. But he is not her thief. He is dying of the theft, bound by a law older than he is, that a god of the dead may keep only what is freely given and can take nothing back by force.

He should have made her a prisoner. Instead he tells her she is free to leave at any word, and means it, and that undoes her more than any chain ever could. Because the one stealing the dead is not the cold god the living curse. It is the gentle one they love, the merciful shepherd every mother prays to at a deathbed, and no one will believe a grave-woman with a book of names.

They think Sorrel is only the girl who washes the dead. They do not know she has already found every stolen name, that she knows the one rite that can call the taken home, and that she has learned to want the terrible, honest god they taught her to fear more than she has ever wanted to be safe.

Deathless is a standalone dark god romantasy with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.