The Sevenfold Theft
The gods are eating us.
Not metaphorically.
Not spiritually.
Literally.
Every soul that dies passes through seven divine toll booths, and at each one, the Thrones take a piece—the part that remembers, the part that matters—before letting the rest continue to rebirth.
They've been doing this for eight thousand years. The math doesn't lie. The ledgers don't balance. And Cael Morrow, gutter-raised pattern-seer with too many knives and not enough impulse control, just found the receipts.
Now he's on the run. Died once already—came back because his wife Veraine pulled him through death when they were twelve and apparently that creates a permanent cosmic leash. The Ember, god of passion, tasted his soul and wants seconds. The other Thrones want him silenced. And somewhere in the crawlspaces between realities, a rebellion is forming out of smugglers and abandoned children and a three-hundred-year-old double agent who's been waiting for exactly this moment.
Seven books. Seven thefts. One heretic who can't stay dead trying to figure out how to unmake heaven without breaking everything else in the process.
The catch: the gods aren't evil. They're scared. They broke the wheel when they built their Thrones, and the wound at the bottom of existence—the Gnaw—has been spreading ever since. They keep feeding because they don't know how to stop. Because stopping might kill them. Because eight thousand years of consumption has made them need it the way fire needs fuel.
Cael doesn't want to destroy them. He wants to give the universe a choice. Open the wheel. Remove the toll booths. Let souls decide for themselves: return, remain, dissolve, transcend. Death as a door instead of a funnel.
But someone has to become that door.
Someone has to stand in the threshold forever.
He thinks it should be him.
Veraine has other ideas.