VERTICAL
Chapter 1
The Summit
Breathing the crisp mountain air above fourteen thousand feet felt like it stripped my ribs bare, shocking life back into muscles dulled by hours of climbing. I had pushed up from camp through the early morning dark, fighting high winds and near-whiteout conditions, front-pointing steep snow with an ice axe in one hand and a hiking pole in the other. Now, standing on the summit of Mount Shasta, exhaustion gave way to something else entirely.
Mount Shasta felt unlike any peak I had ever climbed, her presence rising from the volcanic spine beneath my boots. The Cascades stretched endlessly below, ridgelines stacked and fading into the distance. I set down my axe and pole and sat cross-legged in the snow, letting the sun warm my skin, already exposed too long at altitude.
Then, on the far horizon, the light changed. A violent flash bloomed into a towering plume, rising fast, spreading outward, too symmetrical, too deliberate. Colors churned inside the cloud as it climbed.
Was I delirious?
It couldn’t be what it looked like. Scenes like that belonged to textbooks. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Not here. Not on American soil.
How far away was it?
There was only dead silence, broken by the wind tearing across the summit. Then came a low, distant rumble that vibrated through the mountain and into my chest. It settled the question instantly. I could not stay here.
I needed to move, and fast.
If I descended toward civilization, who knew what I would find waiting below. The range, however, stretched on for hundreds of miles. I knew exactly how little food and fuel I carried. I didn’t know how long my body could endure the altitude, but staying high and traversing the mountain felt like the only option that made sense.
I could not stay on the summit.
Whatever had been hit was somewhere below. Roads meant towns. Towns meant people, and people might mean targets. For now, the mountains felt safer.
Mountaineering was still new to me. I had climbed several peaks, most far less technical than Shasta. Mount Hood had been my first guided climb. I had chosen Shasta because it was the anniversary of my brother’s death. This climb was supposed to be for him.
Turning my back to the exposure was the part of downclimbing I resented most. Every instinct screamed against it. But I needed to drop lower along the ridgeline, to breathe easier, to follow the spine of the mountain away from whatever was unfolding beyond the horizon.
One step at a time, always maintaining three points of contact. The axe stayed in my lead hand, while my free hand pressed into the slope for balance. I placed my boots deliberately, searching for firm rock, careful to avoid loose talus and thin patches of ice. On the steeper rolls of terrain, I turned in and downclimbed facing the mountain. When the angle eased and the footing improved, I turned back outward and continued lower, steadying myself with each step.
The wind turned brutal, surging with flurries that whipped at my shell and tore at my hair. Without my goggles and balaclava, my face would have been raw with windburn in minutes. The gusts howled across the ridge, carrying something feral in their sound, deepening the unease already coiled in my chest.
To think that in my lifetime, of all times, the world would come under siege while I stood on top of it. While I had chased summits and silence, everything beneath me was unraveling into chaos.
I had not planned to stay at altitude for days.
I turned up my radio, cycling through static until a voice finally broke through, thin and distorted.
“Please take cover. We are under attack.”
Meet the believers, doubters, friends, enemies, and ordinary people caught in something they cannot explain.
SPOILER-FREE · CHARACTER GUIDE
Intelligent, ambitious, and fiercely certain of what he believes—or rather, what he doesn’t.
Adrian has built his worldview around reason. An Ivy League education and a future full of possibilities seem to place him firmly in control of his own story. But when increasingly disturbing experiences begin challenging everything he considers rational, skepticism becomes more than an intellectual position.
It becomes something he has to defend.
Visual: Adrian should absolutely lead the page. Young, polished enough to reflect his academic world, but not corporate. I’d give him a slightly guarded expression rather than a smile. He should look like somebody who is accustomed to being the smartest person in the conversation—and is beginning to encounter something intelligence alone cannot solve.
Hadrea Verga enters Adrian’s life like the beginning of an ordinary college romance.
Beautiful, confident, and magnetic, she is the one who crosses the room and asks the reserved Adrian Luz to dance. But Hadrea’s story quickly becomes tangled in Adrian’s deteriorating world—and in the lives of people far beyond him.
Orphaned young and raised by her fortune-telling grandmother, Hadrea comes from a background that sits strangely close to the supernatural questions Adrian is determined to dismiss.
As relationships fracture and loyalties shift, Hadrea becomes part of a much larger question running through Skepticism:
Where Adrian questions, Adelina believes.
Her faith gives her a framework for things Adrian would rather explain away, creating one of the novel’s most important tensions: what happens when two people can witness the same world and interpret it completely differently?
I wouldn’t make her portrait overtly religious. Let her look like a normal young woman whose faith is simply part of who she is. That makes the contrast with Adrian more interesting.
Mario belongs to Adrian’s human world—the friendships, conversations, ambitions, and relationships that existed before anything became strange.
That makes characters like him especially valuable in Skepticism. The supernatural doesn’t arrive in an isolated gothic mansion. It begins invading the lives of young adults who are supposed to be worrying about school, careers, relationships, and their futures.
His portrait can consequently feel warmer and more relaxed than Adrian’s.
Trina is Adelina’s best friend, roommate, and one of the people drawn into Adrian Luz’s increasingly complicated world.
Warm but far from passive, Trina is willing to speak her mind—especially when Adrian’s behavior crosses a line. Her faith connects her closely to Adelina, while her growing relationship with Mario brings the four friends together even as Adrian’s experiences become increasingly difficult to explain.
Adrian’s story isn’t happening in a vacuum.
Catalina helps establish the person Adrian was before the events of the novel began changing him. Family can recognize things in us that friends and acquaintances miss—and sometimes notice a change before we’re willing to acknowledge it ourselves.
For her portrait, I’d deliberately create some subtle visual resemblance between Catalina and Adrian without making them look identical.
Some people enter a story carrying answers.
Others carry questions that make everything worse.
Horacio belongs closer to the novel’s unsettling side. His portrait shouldn’t immediately scream horror character, though. Skepticism works because its paranormal elements emerge from an otherwise ordinary world.
I’d make him serious, slightly difficult to read, and visually distinct from the younger college-age characters.
Jake represents a very different kind of power from anything paranormal.
Wealth, status, confidence, and the assumptions that come with them make him recognizable long before anything supernatural needs to happen. He’s also useful because Skepticism isn’t only interested in demons, possession, or belief. It’s interested in the ugliness ordinary people are perfectly capable of producing themselves.
His portrait should look expensive without becoming a caricature. Clean-cut, attractive, confident, perhaps even charming at first glance. The discomfort should come from knowing him, not looking at him.
Mathew expands the world beyond Adrian’s immediate peer group and gives us another adult presence within the social structure surrounding these characters.
I’d make his portrait considerably more conventional and established than Adrian’s generation. It will visually reinforce that Skepticism spans families and communities rather than functioning solely as a college horror story
Belinda helps populate that deceptively normal world surrounding Adrian.
And that’s something I would emphasize throughout this entire feature: these people should look like they belong in a drama before they look like they belong in a horror novel.
That makes what eventually happens around them much creepier.
Jennifer rounds out the younger ensemble and helps preserve the feeling that these are recognizable young adults living recognizable lives.
Pastor Flores is a man of faith confronted by a young man determined to challenge it.
When Adrian first encounters him, he sees little more than another preacher asking a congregation for money—and openly accuses him of being a fraud. Pastor Flores responds not with retaliation, but by revealing that the church’s offering is being used to help underprivileged families.
Meet the architects, kings, fools, lovers, and pieces behind the events of the Through the Fire saga.
SPOILER-FREE · CHARACTER GUIDE
JADE — THE CO-ARCHITECT
She didn’t inherit the kingdom. She helped design it.
STRATEGIST · CONFIDANTE · BELIEVER
Jade has spent much of her life believing the world is badly designed.
Belial offers her the opportunity to rebuild it.
Intelligent, composed, ambitious, and fiercely loyal, Jade doesn’t merely stand beside the Architect. She studies people, chooses alliances, manages personalities and helps transform an ancient dream into a modern political reality.
She believes in what they are building.
Perhaps even more dangerously, she believes in him.
But Jade understands other people far better than she understands the place she occupies in Belial’s life.
And the closer their vision comes to completion, the harder it becomes to separate devotion from jealousy, purpose from possession, and the woman helping move the pieces from another piece on the board.
This feels much more accurate than simply “the woman beside the Architect.” She’s genuinely a co-architect. The manuscript even has her assuming operational command after Lemuria and dividing their influence geographically while recognizing that Belial has assigned everyone a position.
BELIAL — THE ARCHITECT
Nothing was ever left to chance.
FALLEN ANGEL · STRATEGIST · KINGMAKER
Belial does not simply manipulate people.
He builds worlds around them.
Kingdoms. Religions. Relationships. Political movements. Even identities.
Ancient and extraordinarily patient, he understands that the strongest prison rarely looks like one. Give people the right dream, the right enemy, the right lover or the right version of themselves, and eventually they will walk exactly where he wants them to go.
Usually.
The Architect follows the events of Through the Fire from the side of the man who believed he understood why everything happened.
And exposes the dangerous difference between designing a plan and controlling the people inside it.
That’s especially appropriate because we learn his architecture extends far beyond Lemuria. Even Flo is revealed as one of his long-running social experiments; he has been shaping Deacon’s community for decades.
HANS / THE JESTER — THE FOOL
Everyone thinks the fool is joking. That is what makes him dangerous.
JESTER · SERVANT · OBSERVER
Hans is almost always nearby.
Opening doors. Serving drinks. Standing in corners. Watching.
And occasionally saying something nobody understands until much later.
Known simply as Hans in Belial’s ordinary life and increasingly as the Jester within the Lemurian Order, he occupies a strange position inside the Architect’s world. He appears subordinate to Belial, yet speaks about kings, fools, lovers and destruction with an unsettling detachment from everyone else’s schemes.
Jade finds his riddles irritating.
Ignoring them doesn’t make them less accurate.
In a world populated by people desperate to control the future, the quiet man dressed as a fool may understand more about where everyone is headed than any of them realize.
This is why I think Hans is important.
He isn’t a conventional supporting character. He’s almost the novel’s chorus/fool/oracle.
His lines repeatedly sit outside the immediate psychology of the POV character. He warns Jade not to get between “the archer and his mark”; watches her transformation after taking the mark and describes bitterness reaching the roots; comments cryptically on Roselyn becoming the fool and Leo/Maricel as the separated lovers; and at the gala tells Jade that what has been lost cannot be undone.
And there’s another fascinating thing: Belial doesn’t dismiss him. At the gala, Belial actually smirks at Hans’s cryptic observation.
So I would preserve his ambiguity on the website. Don’t explain what Hans is. Make a new reader think, Wait—why does the servant get his own character card?
That’s perfect.
AZAZEL — THE KING
He was given a kingdom. Nobody asked whether he could be controlled once he had it.
FALLEN ANGEL · KING · RIVAL
Belial understands Azazel better than almost anyone alive.
His vanity. His appetites. His impulsiveness. His loneliness.
And his extraordinary capacity to destroy whatever carefully constructed role has been prepared for him.
Azazel is supposed to become the visible king of a world other people have designed behind the scenes.
Instead, he repeatedly behaves like exactly what he has always been:
Azazel.
Ancient history binds him to Belial. Maricel complicates that history. And beneath their alliances lies the uncomfortable question of which brother has actually been manipulating the other.
This is much stronger through Architect than “old rival,” because Belial is simultaneously contemptuous of Azazel and deeply invested in positioning him. He thinks Azazel has control at the gala while privately regarding that control as an illusion.
MARICEL — THE VARIABLE
She was supposed to follow the script.
ACTRESS · BELIEVER · WILDCARD
Maricel is not the protagonist of The Architect.
For perhaps the first time, readers are asked to watch her from the outside.
Jade initially sees an inexperienced young woman spectacularly unsuited to rule anything.
Belial sees something more useful.
Then something more interesting.
Then something he cannot quite categorize.
Maricel possesses an inconvenient tendency to believe people completely—and an equally inconvenient tendency to stop believing them once she sees behind the illusion.
She was meant to occupy a predetermined place in someone else’s kingdom.
Instead, her choices begin changing the people who were supposed to control hers.
That is much closer to what the manuscript actually does with her. Belial becomes fascinated precisely because her attachment doesn’t resemble Jade’s or Venus’s transactional desires; he recognizes something in her devotion that he cannot manufacture.
I also wouldn’t call her “The Obsession” on the website. That’s too revealing. The Variable tells the reader exactly what her structural function is without spoiling where Belial’s feelings go.
LEO — THE WEAPON
A weapon is useful until it chooses its own target.
ASSASSIN · SURVIVOR · DISRUPTION
Leo was raised to obey.
Other people have spent years deciding whom he should fear, whom he should kill and what he should believe.
That should make him easy for Belial to understand.
It doesn’t.
Violent, guarded and far more perceptive than his silence suggests, Leo becomes increasingly dangerous whenever his loyalties stop aligning with the people attempting to use him.
Belial knows how to manipulate an assassin.
The problem is that Leo keeps becoming a man.
JALEN LOVELL — THE STATESMAN
He doesn’t need a throne if the entire world is listening.
POLITICIAN · STRATEGIST · POWER BROKER
Jalen understands human power better than nearly anyone around him.
Unlike the ancient beings surrounding him, he doesn’t require supernatural abilities to command a room. He understands institutions, appearances, public fear and the value of giving people exactly what they need at precisely the right moment.
Belial provides the architecture.
Jalen learns how to sell it.
And unlike many of Belial’s human collaborators, Jalen has ambitions entirely his own.
I’d elevate Jalen significantly from our first draft. He isn’t merely “the politician.” He’s part of the original strategic trio with Jade and Belial during the Lemuria planning, and later becomes essential to converting their supernatural agenda into legitimate political authority.
TESS — THE VESSEL
She spent her life wanting to be chosen. Something finally chose her.
FIRST LADY · PRIESTESS · RIVAL
Beautiful, ambitious and intensely conscious of status, Tess has always understood life as competition.
She wants the role.
The man.
The attention.
The better life.
What she doesn’t understand is how long other forces have been preparing her to receive them.
From Jade’s perspective, Tess initially seems far better suited to their plans than Maricel: polished, ambitious and capable of following the script.
But becoming exactly what someone wanted you to become carries a price.
That captures the Naamah component much better. The manuscript explicitly establishes Tess as a vessel Naamah has cultivated for years.
ROSLYN — THE WHISPERER
She doesn’t need to move the pieces if she can tell them where to move themselves.
MANIPULATOR · CONFIDANTE · INSTIGATOR
Roselyn rarely needs physical power.
People tell her things.
She notices weaknesses.
And when she finds the right insecurity, she knows exactly where to press.
That makes her useful inside a movement built on manipulation.
It also makes her dangerous to the person who believes manipulation belongs to him.
Roselyn understands Jade’s jealousy, Tess’s attachments and Belial’s increasingly contradictory behavior perhaps better than any of them would like.
The mistake is assuming understanding the Architect means you’re safe from him.
And I love that Hans essentially comments on her manipulation immediately after her confrontation with Belial.
VENUS — THE DEVOTEE
Some people spend centuries waiting to be chosen.
IMMORTAL · DEVOTEE · SURVIVOR
Venus knows exactly what it means to orbit powerful men.
She has loved, waited, competed and survived long enough to understand that immortality does not make rejection hurt less.
Where Jade wants purpose and Maricel offers faith, Venus wants something painfully ordinary:
to finally be wanted by the person she wants.
In Belial’s world, even that can be exploited.
Meet the survivors, believers, skeptics, prophets, and ancient powers caught amid the fire.
THROUGH THE FIRE · BOOK TWO
SPOILER-FREE
AMID THE FIRE
Three years ago, Maricel disappeared.
Now she lives in Dallas under another name.
She works in a bookstore. She attends community college. She studies scripture. And after years spent rebuilding her life from almost nothing, she has found something she once desperately lacked:
purpose.
But Maricel hasn’t forgotten what happened to her.
She hasn’t forgotten Azazel.
And while the people around her see political unrest, strange events and a world becoming increasingly unstable, Maricel sees something else.
Prophecy.
Volatile was about stepping into a world Maricel didn’t understand.
Embers begins with Maricel understanding enough to be terrified of what may come next.
THE CENTER
MARICEL
The woman who escaped one life only to discover the story wasn’t finished with her.
SURVIVOR · SEEKER · PROPHET
The Maricel who begins Embers is not the young actress who once dreamed of meeting an angel.
She has already met one.
And she knows what extraordinary things can cost.
For three years, Maricel has lived publicly as Patricia, trading Hollywood for books, school and a quiet life in Dallas. Her growing faith has given her a new way to understand the things she experienced—and the things she believes are still coming.
Because Maricel doesn’t believe the instability around her is random.
She believes she can see what’s ahead.
The problem is convincing anyone else.
Can you become someone new when the world keeps calling you back to who you were?
THE ONE WHO LISTENS
MASON
The one who takes her seriously when almost no one else will.
BOOKSTORE OWNER · BOSS · BIBLE STUDY LEADER
Dr. Mason Richmond is Maricel’s new boss.
Even-tempered, intelligent and interested in many of the same theological questions that consume her, Mason offers Maricel something increasingly rare:
He listens.
When others find her ideas strange, Mason encourages her to speak. When Maricel questions whether she has any authority to interpret what she’s seeing, Mason sees potential in her.
Their shared interest in prophecy draws them closer.
And being believed can make someone extraordinarily important to a person who has spent years being doubted.
What happens when someone finally tells you the things everyone else doubts might be real?
THE ONES WHO REMEMBERS
LESLIE
The best friend who has already seen Maricel through one impossible life.
BEST FRIEND · CONFIDANTE · LOYALIST
Leslie knew Maricel before Dallas.
Before Patricia.
Before prophecy became something Maricel studied instead of something that happened to her.
As Maricel’s best friend, Leslie doesn’t need to understand every supernatural force surrounding her to recognize when Maricel needs someone beside her.
She listens when Maricel is afraid.
She tells her things she may not want to hear.
And when Maricel’s life becomes impossible again, Leslie does what she has always done:
she stays.
That loyalty is particularly explicit when Erich volunteers them for a dangerous mission with the simple answer, “Leslie and I as always.”
Some friendships survive because neither person ever learns how to leave.
ERICH
The skeptic who learned that disbelief doesn’t make danger disappear.
SKEPTIC · WITNESS · FRIEND
Erich has never needed Maricel’s supernatural explanations to recognize danger.
He remembers Hollywood.
He remembers Claudius.
And he remembers watching someone he cared about become entangled with something he never trusted.
Years later, Maricel has found faith and a new explanation for the world around her.
Erich remains willing to ask the questions other people don’t.
But skepticism has never meant abandonment.
When Maricel walks toward danger again, Erich is still there.
You don’t have to share someone’s beliefs to believe what happened to them.
THE FRIENDS WHO JOINED THE JOURNEY
CAROLINE
The friend willing to listen before she understands.
BELIEVER · FRIEND · HEART
Caroline enters Maricel’s life knowing her as Patricia.
What she eventually receives is a much more complicated truth.
Warm, devout and open-minded, Caroline doesn’t always understand Maricel’s interpretation of the world.
She doesn’t have to.
Where others respond to uncertainty by becoming rigid, Caroline leaves room for compassion.
And as Maricel’s world becomes increasingly divided between believers and skeptics, prophets and impostors, Caroline offers something deceptively simple:
someone willing to stay beside her while still asking questions.
Sometimes believing someone begins with listening.
KEVIN
The husband who discovers that his wife’s new friendship comes with a much larger world.
HUSBAND · FRIEND · COMPANION
Kevin enters Maricel’s world through Caroline.
But as that world becomes stranger—and considerably more dangerous—he doesn’t remain merely his wife’s plus-one.
He becomes part of the group itself.
Practical, social and willing to follow his friends into situations none of them could have anticipated, Kevin helps make Embers feel less like the story of isolated prophets and supernatural beings and more like something happening to ordinary people alongside them.
When the group faces one of its dangerous missions, Kevin’s answer is telling:
if Caroline is going, so is he.
Sometimes loyalty means entering a story you never expected to be yours.
WARREN
The friend who never quite stops asking whether any of this is a good idea.
FRIEND · REALIST · COMPANION
Warren brings something Maricel’s increasingly prophetic world desperately needs:
another person willing to question it.
He can joke when everyone else is terrified, challenge plans that sound suicidal and still climb into the car when the group decides to go anyway.
That combination makes Warren part skeptic, part comic relief and part reminder that not everyone traveling beside Maricel has to experience events with the same solemn certainty.
When an extraordinarily dangerous mission is proposed, his eventual answer is simple:
“Count me in.”
You can think the plan is insane and still refuse to let your friends face it alone.
POLITICIAN · REFORMER · CONTENDER
Jalen shouldn’t be introduced through everything we know about him from later material or the AU. He should be Embers Jalen only.
His section should essentially establish:
Jalen is a rising political figure entering a world already destabilized by fear, religious upheaval and questions about what comes next.
To most people, he is a politician.
To Maricel, politics can no longer be separated so easily from prophecy.
And as Jalen’s influence grows, his place in the changing world becomes increasingly difficult for her to ignore.
When you’ve spent years studying the end of the world, how do you look at someone promising to build a new one?
THE OTHER PROPHET
LEO
The stranger who sees what Maricel sees.
OUTSIDER · PROPHET · SURVIVOR
For years, Maricel has carried knowledge that sounds impossible when spoken aloud.
Then she meets Leo.
Unkempt, unpredictable and operating by a moral code very different from the people Maricel has surrounded herself with, Leo isn’t an obvious answer to anything.
But he understands things he shouldn’t.
He sees patterns Maricel recognizes.
And most unsettling of all, he possesses the same strange gift Maricel has been struggling to understand in herself.
For someone who has spent years wondering whether anyone could truly understand what she sees, Leo represents something Maricel didn’t expect to find:
recognition.
But recognition and trust aren’t necessarily the same thing.
What happens when the person everyone tells you not to trust is the first person who truly understands what you see?
THE LIFE HE LEFT BEHIND
CICELY
The woman everyone once thought Leo would marry.
RIVAL · TRADITION · LOYALIST
Cicely knew Leo long before Maricel did.
In Flo, their future once seemed almost predetermined. Their families expected it. Cicely believed in it. And even after Leo walked away from the life chosen for him, the possibility of his return never entirely disappeared.
Then he comes home with Maricel.
To Cicely, Maricel isn’t simply another woman competing for Leo’s affection.
She’s an outsider.
She carries beliefs Cicely distrusts, a history tied to people Cicely has every reason to hate, and a connection to Leo that threatens the future Flo once imagined for him.
The manuscript makes that pressure explicit: Leo’s father tells him that his mother’s dying wish was for him to return, marry Cicely and have a normal family in Flo.
So Cicely represents more than romantic rivalry.
She represents the life Leo was supposed to choose.
What happens when someone else’s freedom means losing the future you thought was yours?
That question makes her much more dimensional than simply labeling her “Leo’s jealous ex.”
THE THRESHOLD
Now the entire page changes.
Everything above has been contemporary:
Dallas. Books. Friends. Faith. Flo. Human relationships.
MARICEL LEFT THEIR WORLD.
THEIR WORLD NEVER LEFT HERS.
THE ANGEL SHE ESCAPED
AZAZEL
The angel Maricel once knew as Claudius.
WATCHER · KING · FORMER FIANCÉ
For three years, Maricel has tried to construct a life beyond Azazel.
But Azazel was never simply someone she loved.
He is an ancient angel—a Watcher whose history stretches far beyond Maricel’s own—and Maricel now understands his world far better than she did when she first met him as Claudius.
Whatever Maricel believes she escaped, Azazel hasn’t forgotten her.
Nor has he abandoned his vision for what she could become beside him.
THE QUEEN
TESS
The woman who steps willingly toward the world Maricel ran from.
BELIEVER · QUEEN · COUNTERPOINT
Maricel has spent years trying to escape a world of ancient powers, predetermined roles and beings who seem certain they know what she should become.
Tess sees that world differently.
Where Maricel has learned to question extraordinary promises, Tess is willing to consider what might be waiting on the other side of them.
That makes her a counterpoint to Maricel:
two women confronted with the possibility of becoming something larger than the lives they once knew—and responding very differently.
What looks like a cage to one person can look like a kingdom to another.
ONE FACE IS MISSING.
BELIAL
There is another angel woven through Embers.
Ancient. Calculating. Mocha-eyed.
A name Maricel has encountered before.
But showing you which face belongs to him would answer a question the novel should answer first.
MARICEL · MASON · LESLIE · ERICH · CAROLINE · KEVIN · WARREN · JALEN · LEO · CICELY · AZAZEL · TESS
Some believe her.
Some doubt her.
Some remember who she was.
Some understand things no one else can.
Some represent the lives that might have been.
Some have already decided what Maricel should become.
And somewhere between prophecy, faith, friendship, love and power, Maricel is trying to answer something for herself:
FROM THE AUTHOR
What interested me in writing Embers was what happens when escape doesn’t mean the story is over.
Maricel begins the novel believing she has already survived the most dangerous part of her life. She has changed her name, rebuilt herself and found a faith that gives meaning to things she once couldn’t understand.
But Embers isn’t the aftermath.
Maricel is still amid the fire.
The difference is that now she knows she’s burning.
As her old world collides with the new one, nearly everyone around her seems to have an idea of who she is supposed to become.
Some see a prophet.
Some see someone they need to protect.
Some see someone they can love.
Some see someone who belongs to them.
And some see a role for her in a future she isn’t sure she wants.
Others see something much more dangerous.
Where some see prophecy, others see obsession. They see a woman losing her grip on reality, drawing the people around her deeper into beliefs that sound increasingly impossible. To some, the little community forming around her doesn’t look like fellowship.
It looks like a cult.
And there are others who don’t merely doubt Maricel.
They want to stop her.
At the center of all of it is a question Maricel is finally beginning to ask:
If everyone believes your life has a purpose, how do you know which part of that purpose you actually chose?
THROUGH THE FIRE · BOOK ONE
Meet the dreamers, believers, skeptics, survivors, and ancient beings at the beginning of the Through the Fire saga.
SPOILER-FREE · 10 MIN READ
Before the Fire
Maricel has come to Los Angeles chasing a life much larger than the one she left behind.
A twenty-two-year-old actress with a fascination for mythology and the unexplained, she has spent years communicating through visions with a being she knows as Claudius—her guardian angel.
Then Claudius tells her it’s finally time to meet.
What begins as the fulfillment of something Maricel has dreamed about for years gradually opens a door into a world much older, stranger, and more dangerous than the one she thought she understood.
Volatile is a story about love, faith, ambition, identity, and power—and the uneasy space between choosing your own path and understanding who may have helped build it.
THE CENTER
Maricel
The dreamer who wants something more.
22 · ACTRESS · LOS ANGELES
Maricel wants more from life than ordinary existence seems willing to give her.
Reserved but intensely imaginative, she has spent much of her life caught between skepticism and a fascination with things she can’t explain. Acting offers her one escape. Mythology offers another.
Claudius offers something else entirely:
the feeling of being understood.
He knows the part of her that wonders whether the world is stranger than everyone insists it is. More importantly, he seems to understand the part of her that has always believed she was meant for something beyond an ordinary life.
That makes Maricel’s greatest strength—her willingness to leap toward the unknown—one of her greatest vulnerabilities.
CURIOUS · IDEALISTIC · RESTLESS
How do you know a choice belongs entirely to you?
THE MYSTERY
Claudius
The angel who finally stepped out of her dreams.
GUARDIAN · CONFIDANT · SOMETHING MORE
For three years, Maricel has known Claudius through visions.
When they finally meet beneath the Hollywood sign, he seems to be everything she believed he was: charming, brilliant, protective, and almost impossibly capable.
He knows history because he witnessed it. He can take her places other people could only imagine. And he understands parts of Maricel she has never been able to explain to anyone else.
But there are things Claudius doesn’t tell her.
And beneath his humor and affection lies a temper capable of making even Maricel afraid.
CHARISMATIC · MERCURIAL · SECRETIVE
What does trust mean when one person knows the whole story and the other doesn’t?
THE WORLD AROUND HER
Not everyone in Maricel’s life is looking toward the supernatural.
Some are trying to pull her back.
Others are beginning to realize that perhaps she wasn’t imagining as much as they thought.
Leslie
The best friend.
ACTRESS · ROMANTIC · SOCIAL
Leslie brings Maricel back to earth.
Ambitious, outgoing, relationship-oriented, and considerably more social than her introverted best friend, Leslie believes Maricel spends far too much time locked inside her own head.
Their friendship predates the supernatural world consuming Maricel’s life.
That makes Leslie one of Maricel’s remaining connections to normalcy—a life of auditions, relationships, friendship, and ordinary problems that increasingly seems to belong to another world.
WARM · AMBITIOUS · OUTGOING
How long can someone remain part of your old life when you are becoming someone new?
Erich
The skeptic who won’t stop warning her.
SUSPICIOUS · PERSISTENT · PROTECTIVE
Erich doesn’t see Claudius the way Maricel does.
Where she sees a guardian, he recognizes something dangerous.
His increasingly urgent attempts to convince her of that make him look obsessive long before Maricel understands why he is so afraid.
But Erich’s warnings aren’t abstract.
He has a history that makes the supernatural considerably more personal than Maricel initially realizes.
And unlike Maricel, Erich isn’t interested in being enchanted by any of it.
What if the person everyone thinks is paranoid is the only one asking the right questions?
BEYOND THE WORLD SHE KNOWS
The circle widens.
And not everyone Maricel meets belongs to the life she thought she was building.
Logan
THE SURVIVOR
Pragmatic · Hardened · Perceptive
Logan has learned to judge the world according to what it does rather than what it claims to be.
She enters Maricel’s life carrying experiences that make innocence a luxury—and survival something considerably more morally complicated.
Logan knows what it means to live inside a world where violence has rules, loyalty has a price, and sometimes surviving requires becoming someone you never intended to be.
She has little patience for illusions.
Especially other people’s.
Tess
Beautiful · Elusive · Unsettling
THE ENIGMA
Tess is difficult to place.
There is something about her that seems to belong to the world Maricel is only beginning to understand, although exactly where she fits is much harder to determine.
She is poised, mysterious, and more connected to the people surrounding Maricel than first appearances suggest.
Some people enter your life as strangers.
Others feel as though they’ve arrived carrying a history no one has bothered to tell you.
Tess is the latter.
Francis
THE LOYALIST
Loyal · Wounded · Courageous
Francis exists close enough to power to understand it while never possessing the same freedom as those above him.
He knows what obedience costs.
He also knows that loyalty and trust are not necessarily the same thing.
His relationship with Maricel raises quieter questions about dignity, hierarchy, and what remains between two people once the structures around them begin determining who holds power over whom.
How much of yourself can you surrender before loyalty becomes something else?
Ava
THE OBSERVER
Quiet · Guarded · Watchful
Ava is easy to overlook.
That is precisely why readers shouldn’t.
She understands this world from a position very different from Maricel’s and carries a history she isn’t particularly interested in explaining.
Ava has learned the usefulness of silence.
While other people argue, threaten, protect, command, and demand to be heard, Ava watches.
And sometimes the person saying the least understands considerably more than everyone else.
Semjaza
THE WATCHER
Ancient · Authoritative · Calculating
Some of the mythology Maricel has spent her life reading isn’t mythology at all.
Semjaza belongs to that older world—a history of Watchers, rebellion, and consequences stretching far beyond Maricel’s lifetime.
To Maricel, names like his once belonged to ancient texts and stories.
Now those stories are beginning to acquire faces.
And beings like Semjaza haven’t disappeared simply because humanity stopped believing they existed.
What happens when mythology remembers that it was history?
Naamah
THE SHADOW
Ancient · Beautiful · Unknowable
Some names survive for a reason.
Naamah is one of them.
She belongs to stories far older than Maricel, Los Angeles, or the world Maricel believes she understands.
Exactly where those stories end—and where the truth begins—is something Volatile leaves for Maricel to discover.
For now, it is enough to know the name.
Naamah.
Because not every story that becomes a legend is finished.
ONE NAME IS MISSING
Azazel.
If you’ve already read Volatile, you know.
If you haven’t:
Meet Claudius first.
That’s how Maricel knows him.
And this story works best when you know only as much as she does.
NO SPOILERS. KEEP READING. →
FROM THE AUTHOR
Everyone is looking at the same story differently.
One of the things that interests me most about Volatile is that its characters can occupy the same world, encounter the same people, and experience many of the same events while reaching completely different conclusions about what they mean.
Maricel can look at Claudius and see love.
Erich can look at him and see danger.
Someone else can look at power and see security.
Another can experience that same system and see imprisonment.
One person sees loyalty where another sees submission. Faith can look like courage from one perspective and blindness from another.
And none of those interpretations exists completely independently of the person doing the looking.
Maricel begins Volatile believing that the greatest question in her life is whether the extraordinary things she has experienced are real.
But there is a harder question underneath that one:
If they are real, what does that actually mean?
Believing someone exists doesn’t mean you understand them.
Being loved doesn’t necessarily mean you understand why you were chosen.
And receiving everything you’ve dreamed about doesn’t guarantee that the person offering it wants the same things for you that you want for yourself.
That’s the tension at the heart of Volatile.
Maricel desperately wants to understand the extraordinary world opening around her.
But understanding that world will eventually require something much harder than deciding what she believes.
It will require deciding who she wants to be within it.
If someone gives you everything
you thought you wanted,
when do you start asking
why they wanted you to have it?
TEN CHARACTERS. TEN LENSES.
One story that looks very different depending on who is telling it.
Enter Volatile. →