The Odd Company & The Circlet of the Abyss - Jack S Frank

The Odd Company & The Circlet of the Abyss

The OnceWas Chronicles: Book Two

Some curses don't break. They transform.

When the Odd Company buried Harbek on a grey mountain and rode back down into the world, they believed the worst was behind them. They were wrong.

King Aradun of Dunmar is dead-struck by an enchanted arrow no priest can mend. Prince Aldun has vanished into the hands of the treacherous Duke Cedric. And in the capital, the usurper Lord Eldred rises toward a stolen throne, his banners marked with black ravens and something far darker moving behind his eyes.

The Company has been asked to ride for the city of Griffindale and set things right. But the conspiracy they're riding into is older and hungrier than any of them realize.

Avestdra found the circlet in the dark. She put it on to save her friends. Now something ancient and ruthless is waking inside it-a long-dead witch named Isoma Ixal, whose centuries of patience are finally paying off. With every mile traveled, Isoma's memories bleed into Avestdra's own. Her expressions grow colder. She avoids mirrors, afraid of whose face she'll see looking back. And from somewhere deep in the Void, Isoma's son whispers to her with a voice like ice and ruin-Ixalor, the Whisper King, the god-emperor who nearly broke the world, who has waited six hundred years for someone to put on his mother's crown.

While Hunter, Evron, and Buildil fight to save a prince and restore a kingdom-shadowed by a creature from beyond the known world, and by enemies who wear the faces of allies-Avestdra wages a war no sword can touch: a battle for her own identity against a soul more powerful, more ruthless, and far more willing to sacrifice everything than she ever imagined she would face.

What begins as a rescue mission becomes a coronation, a death, a resurrection, and a reckoning with a goddess who thought she owned the most dangerous woman in the room.

The Circlet of the Abyss is an epic fantasy of political conspiracy, psychological horror, and found family pushed to its limits. It is the story of what it costs to carry darkness without being consumed by it-and what it means to finally tell the thing that owns you: no more.