Saber
Art by my friend Punkin!
Tenken Ramos is a witch -- a human born with the innate ability to use magic -- and Ruuntaka's generations-long ban on witchcraft has only recently been lifted. Now on the cusp of his sixteenth winter, Tenken is still tormented by his knight father and the other royal squires. The day he receives his father's saber marks an end to his old life in more ways than one.
August Delacroix can read minds, despite the fact that he's never wanted to. His father's sudden death at the hands of an opposing necromancer leads him and his mother into the heart of foreign Ruuntaka's political minefield. There, he finds an unexpected ally in Tenken, and the boys rapidly bond over what neither of them wants to acknowledge is their trauma.
Han Ramos was sentenced to death twenty winters past, yet he still lives. Isolated in the woods bordering Ruciu, he refuses visitors for the sake of his own safety -- and theirs. When he finds an injured Tenken in the falling snows, though, he heals him and takes him home despite his better judgment.
Agony Panoptes is a girl on the run; from what, she won't say. All she reveals when prodded is that she wants revenge on a necromancer most vile. Living on the streets of Ruciu, though, is not particularly conducive to achieving any sort of vengeance -- until the perfect bait waltzes into the city.
Dea Bianca Ciru has always admired her father. He's been her whole world since she was small, and she's been perfectly content with that -- until an awful truth about him is revealed to her. Now Bianca, inheritor of the last phoenix's flame, is forced to make a choice: will she fight to preserve yesterday, or to protect tomorrow?