Standalone Romantasy
The Hunger of the Moon
A Romantasy of Grief, Curses, and Consent
Available Now
GriefRomantasyHealing
Vespera Duncairn keens for the dead for a living — and hides, every full moon, the thing she becomes: a ravenous shadow that feeds on her own light and memory. Theron Wren is the Binder assigned to stop her, bound by an order that calls her curse a profanity against the moon. Instead, moon after moon, he enters her mind through a consent-rite renewed each time — and finds not a monster, but a woman who was never allowed to grieve.
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Content warning: this book contains mature adult content, including explicit intimacy and themes of grief and loss.
An Excerpt
What the Living Owe the Dead
Evenings came early this time of year, the light going out of the sky well before supper, and Vespera had learned to time her walks by it much as other women in Hallowfen timed theirs by the chapterhouse outpost’s bell — small, rarely rung, audible only faintly on a still night. She had left her own hearth banked low behind her and the kitchen door on its single visible lock — the other two waited for a different kind of night than this — and set out across the darkening lanes with her oilskin bag already familiar and heavy against her hip, its strap worn to the exact curve of her shoulder by years of taking this same walk at this same hour, in this same failing light, toward this same kind of house.
The air had the particular bite fen evenings got this time of year, damp finding its way through wool no matter how tightly a body wrapped it, and she could already smell rain coming from somewhere out past the moor’s edge — a mineral, peaty smell that had nothing to do with the peat-smoke of home fires and everything to do with weather no one in Hallowfen had yet troubled to look up and notice.
Amma Tovey’s cottage sat at the western hem of Hallowfen, past the point where the lanes stopped troubling to be lanes and thinned into the packed footpaths that ran out toward the moor proper, and Vespera had walked the distance from her own door at the steady, deliberate pace she kept for this kind of errand — brisk enough that no one watching would mistake her for reluctant, slow enough that she wouldn’t arrive with her breath still high in her chest and have to steady it in front of a grieving house.
Vespera had learned to cry on command the way other women learned to sew a straight seam: badly at first, then well enough to earn a living by it, then so well that no one thought to ask whether it cost her anything.
It didn’t, usually. That was the trick of it. A keener’s grief was a tool, sharpened and put away, no more her own sorrow than a smith’s hammer was his anger.
She was good at this. She had built a whole life on being good at this.
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