Seven months into a ten-year sentence at Ironhold debtors’ prison, Landen Varyn starts hearing a dead man’s voice finishing his sentences.
The voice belongs to Dorian Graymane — Archmage of the Seventh Circle, executed by the Conclave three centuries ago for crimes that turned out to be inconvenient truths. He didn’t die so much as compress himself into the bond-scar of a dying summons and wait. He’s been waiting for a vessel sensitive enough to house him. Landen — young, malnourished, carrying a suppression collar that burns him every time he reaches for the power humming in his bones — is that vessel. He didn’t volunteer. He doesn’t entirely have a choice.
Neither does the lightning demon.
Vel’tharkin — Sparky — has been pressing his face against the membrane between worlds for three hundred years, waiting for his master’s signal to return. It returned in a prison cell. He came through a crack in the Veil. He is considerably more dangerous than he looks, and he looks like a cat-sized storm.
Together — a broken prisoner, a dead Archmage, and a demon who describes everything in weather — they are navigating a prison built over an ancient power node, a conspiracy that runs from the Warden to the Church to the Conclave’s three-century plan to restart the apocalypse under controlled conditions, and the growing attention of a demon realm that has begun to understand that what happens in this bond-link matters far beyond the walls of Ironhold.
The Church Inquisitor has arrived. He knows what Landen is. He knows what the bond means. He is not here to stop the plan.
He is here to finish it.
Shackled Summons is the first book of the Storm Court Cycle — a dark fantasy series about the cost of binding a god to a broken vessel, the patience of things that wait three centuries for the binding to matter, and what happens when the weapon turns out to be the answer.
The war was not over. It had found its teeth.
