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. →