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by Elijah Stepanovich (Author), Rebekka McCord (Editor)
A love reborn across lifetimes. A war to make sure this is the last one.
Ilija Dragovic buried his father in a Belgrade autumn and walked into the woods to grieve. Something ancient walked out to meet him.
The gods marked him that night, pressed their coins into his hands, spoke of storms and thresholds and a power coiled inside his bones. Fifteen years later, Ilija is a mythology professor at a university in Belgrade, built a life with a woman whose beauty bent rooms around her, and let the forest become a grief-dream he stopped questioning. When the Serbian government moves to erase every trace of pre-Christian memory from the national identity, Ilija's work becomes a crime, his name becomes a target, and the silence he mistook for peace begins to crack.
Then a woman arrives who knows him. She knows the scar on his ribs he never shows anyone. She knows the prayer he whispers in a language he never learned. She fights like grief given a body, loves like someone who has already lost him more times than she can carry, and she holds a truth that will shatter everything he believes about his life, his history, and the gods sleeping beneath the soil of every country he has ever called home.
This is a story about the violence of forgetting and the cost of remembering, about desire worn as devotion and love that has survived death across lifetimes while forces older than nations keep engineering its end. The myths Ilija studies in lecture halls have started breathing, bleeding, and demanding he pick a side.
The Heir of Ash and Thunder braids Slavic, Norse, and Greek mythology through the fracture lines of modern Europe, where gods wear human faces for reasons that are never kind. For readers who want their romance carved from bone and their fantasy steeped in real folklore that bleeds.
