QSFer Fiona Fenn has a new queer fantasy book out (bi, gay, gender fluid, lesbian): The Crack at the Heart of Everything.
He accidentally cursed himself… When the consequences get him exiled to the land he helped terrorize, can this evil wizard find redemption… and love?
Orpheus can’t believe it’s come to this. After helping his childhood friend conquer the realm by raising an army of hell-beasts, the befuddled dark sorcerer finds himself banished when the price of his magic endangers the palace. Isolated and betrayed, the feared spellcaster isn’t exactly thrilled when his irritating and handsome rival keeps stepping between him and certain doom.
Ill at ease in the barren wasteland his powers created, Orpheus slowly warms to the charismatic ex-general’s relentless overtures. But as his feelings grow more intense, the former villain struggles with an inconvenient calling towards heroism.
Will dabbling in good deeds get him killed or open the doors to happily ever after?
The Crack at the Heart of Everything is the charmingly swoon-worthy first book in an epic LGBTQ+ fantasy series. If you like character-driven stories, snarky humor, and well-earned redemption arcs, then you’ll adore Fiona Fenn’s unexpected hero’s journey.
Get It At Amazon | Publisher | B&N | Bookshop.org | Kobo
Excerpt
The sun filters thin and gray through the high filmy windows, the library dreamlike in the gently dispersed light. He picks his way between boxes and bookcases, eyes on the uppermost shelves where the light reaches best. He can’t read the spines from here, but he can count, and by the time he reaches one-thousand the boy has realized he probably won’t be able to read every book in this library, no matter how much he may want to.
There’s so much here. Lives bound into stories from a world that no longer exists—that maybe never existed. He’s not sure if that matters. Everything feels like a fantasy, whether that’s a historian’s account documenting the world before The Incident or King Arthur riding into battle against the Saxons.
The boxes hold more. More books. More of that musty, strangely sweet smell and a cake of dust that was already old well before they arrived here. The newest publications—a term he learned early on, when reading dates was easier than reading words—are three-hundred years old. These are what he’s most familiar with. The hermits had used these when teaching him how to read, and while the accounts are many, they tell the same story. Maybe that’s why they stopped publishing them. Why, after the turn of the twenty-fifth century, there aren’t any new books to read.
A large box blocks his way, the stacks beyond drowned in shadow here at the back of the Library where the light doesn’t reach. The books on the shelf beside him are sorted strangely—not by author, but by size and color. Stranger are the tracks through the gray dust.
Someone has been here recently, and he knows for a fact that the hermits don’t come to the library. It’s why he’s come here, after all. They will be looking for him soon, and he knows they won’t think to search for him here.
“Hello?” he calls into the quiet, just to be sure. Just to be safe.
He doesn’t anticipate that one of the books would move.
He leaps back with a stifled gasp, heart pounding in his chest as a gap emerges between two large green tomes. Darkness fills the crack, but then something else. He has to blink his eyes to make them adjust, but when they do, he sees an eye peering back at him.
A human eye.
Words fail him. He stares into the eye uncomprehending. It’s large and the pupil flooded black in the shadows, focused and unblinking upon him, as if it’s he who is the curiosity here rather than this stranger hiding in the stacks.
He swallows once, feels how his throat has closed up and his stomach has crawled into his chest. He’s looking around before he can stop himself, suddenly sure that this is a trap, that the hermits have found some new way to test him. To push him. To make him hurt and then—and then make him—
“Stop.” A small voice breaks through the quiet—knives through his mind.
More books move, dragging trails through the dust, until a rectangular black void appears, and then a little girl’s face.
He sinks to his knees. His hands are shaking when he clasps them before his chest. He looks into her eyes and it feels like falling.
“Who are you?” he asks.
The girl shrugs, one boney shoulder rising up through long, dark hair. She can’t be much younger than him but she is smaller, thinner, paler despite how wholly those descriptors suit him. All at once, he feels they’re cut from the same cloth. He only knows he’s right because of the band on her wrist. It matches his, the silvered filigree of the hermit’s sigils a mirror to his own.
He’s always been alone but suddenly, he’s not. There’s another. Someone he never knew about. Two children the hermits must have intended to keep apart.
Not anymore. Now, they’ve found one another, and there is nothing in the whole world that will separate them again.
Author Bio
Fiona Fenn is an author of fantasy novels that put complicated “heroes” front and center. A fan of villains, redemption arcs, and intense explorations of healing in all its forms, her debut novel, The Crack at the Heart of Everything, is a love letter to every villain who could have become better but never got the chance.
| Author Website | https://www.fionafennwrites.com |
|---|---|
| Author Twitter | https://twitter.com/byfionafenn |