The Wound At The End Of The World. The Fallstar Rebellion, #1

The Wound at the End of the WorldAn empire built on obedience. A wound older than the throne. And three women who will unravel everything. When Arden Rei arrives in the imperial capital as a hostage in silk, she comes armed with nothing but a scholar's hunger and a dangerous habit of noticing too much. The Emperor's court is a weapon disguised as a ceremony - every oath a chain, every act of loyalty a slow bleeding-out of pride, coin, and self.
Arden intends to survive it. She did not intend to start pulling at the threads that hold the empire together. Oria serves the Empress in silence and reports everything she learns to the Emperor's Master of Whispers - a man who mistakes her compliance for devotion. She is one of the most skilled intelligence operatives in the empire, and she is running out of ways to protect herself from the man who owns her, without becoming something she cannot live with.
Empress Suriel has spent years learning to be decorative and dangerous in equal measure. She knows the Emperor is hiding something older and darker than political ambition. She knows the court is a machine designed to consume women like her. And she knows that the sharp-eyed girl in the green shawl who fled her gaze at the reception may be exactly the kind of mind she has been waiting for. Three hundred years ago, a man walked into a crater and emerged a god.
The empire he built on that moment calls itself eternal - but eternity, Arden is beginning to understand, is simply a lie that has not yet been disproved. The Wound at the End of the World is an epic fantasy of political intrigue, coerced loyalty, and the quiet courage it takes to document the precise mechanism of a lie. For readers who want their court politics morally complex, their romances slow-burning, and their empires ripe for unravelling.