Stories where the magic has rules that bite and every trial costs something. Written from the high desert of New Mexico.
Out now · YA Fantasy
A charcoal-burner's daughter ranked a humiliating 98th discovers the empire's sacred examination is rigged against the provinces. So she sets out to take the machine apart.
Rin Solace reads fire the way other people read books. She solved every construct in the empire's two-hundred-year-old proving ground, and still placed 98th. The exam is not measuring power. It is recognizing the right hands, the right name. With a sharp-eyed merchant's daughter and the first-ranked Lord Cassian Veil, she is going to find the leak in the system and force it to tell the truth.
A merchant's ruined daughter turned scullion is recruited by the crew of thieves who once ran with her murdered mother — to rob the royal Brine Vault during the prince's masque.
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A fifteen-year-old hatchery ward, forbidden by law from ever bonding a dragon, secretly saves a culled runt that imprints on her anyway — then must take the rigged grading system that condemned them both to the one court that can overturn its verdict.
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A scorned thirteen-year-old scavenger awakens the buried power of an ancient civilization and must descend into a dying mountain to reignite the Sun-Forge before the world-devouring Void swallows everything.
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In a dying Bronze-Age world, an architect, a fisherman, and a healer reawaken as the reincarnations of heroes who once failed — just as the Obsidian King arrives to erase everything, and a captive girl's mercy threatens to crack his darkness from within.
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A reluctant farm boy and a Void-marked soldier — two new souls carrying the inherited memories of fallen predecessors — must master the elemental Wuxing Accord to stop an entropy-dragon from unmaking the world.
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The Void that Jax died to stop has survived, drifted across an eon, and reincarnated as the jackal-god Anubis in an ancient-Egypt world — and only the four reborn souls who once defied it can reignite the Sun Forge before their hidden pyramid becomes its…
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As the immortality that defined them rusts away and the world succumbs to a devouring Void, five new souls carrying the inherited memories of fallen gods must learn to be mortal in time to save two dying civilizations.
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A fisher's daughter bonds the rogue storm-hawk that killed the academy's champion — and must ride the beast every rider fears beside the dead champion's brother, who hates her for it, while the endless storm they all fly grows a mind of its own.
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The last firewielder hides as a furnace-girl in a city of ice that executed her kind — until the prince starts freezing from the inside, and the one power that can save him is the exact power her city burns people for.
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A pledge died in Vellum House's secret-society initiation thirty years ago, ruled a hiking accident; his great-niece enrolls on the same scholarship, rushes the House to find the truth, and learns it killed him to protect what it really sells — and the people…
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On the generation ship Meridian, 142 years into a promised 200-year voyage, a sixteen-year-old maintenance apprentice finds sealed star charts proving the ship stopped traveling sixty years ago — it has been circling a dead star ever since, and the world…
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A foundling library apprentice discovers her own fate-book is blank and that someone is secretly editing other people's Lives at a catastrophic cost, and to stop the beloved mentor behind it she must weaponize the one thing that shamed her whole life: her…
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Six years after the sea drowned half her town, a marked fisher-girl is sent down as the first ambassador to the court everyone blames, and discovers the flood was never an attack but the last gasp of a refugee people fleeing a rising dead-tide that is now…
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Every seven years, Briarfell crowns a child and gives them to the wall.
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At Ashmore Hall, they say the lake takes one every generation. Wren Kavanagh just pulled the newest one out of it.
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When the midwinter Draw takes her twelve-year-old sister, Elowen Trask walks the Tithe Road into the Marrowwood to feed the sleeping Beast in her place — and finds not a monster but a cursed boy leashed by her own village's elders, who have fed him a girl a…
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In the last walled city, every sixteen-year-old is scanned and locked into the tier they'll live and die in — but when Marlow's scan comes back null, unassignable, she learns the machine was never measuring what you can do, only whether you'll obey, and that…
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Necromancy is a hanging offense, so when Neve Marrow — a gravedigger's daughter who has hidden her gift her whole life — breaks and wakes the murdered crown prince on his own funeral night, she marks herself for the gallows and has one turn of the moon to…
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The Umbral Order raised Vesper to step through shadow and kill without a trace, and bound a noose of dark under her skin that tightens every day a contract runs unfinished — so when her first solo mark is the boy-emperor everyone wants dead, and he becomes…
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In the poison-court of Threnn, where the great houses feud with dosed wine and every royal keeps a taster sworn to die in their place, Liora Fennwick — an apothecary's daughter pressed into the crown's service, hiding an unregistered gift: she can taste a…
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In Verrenglass, where luck can be bled off a stranger's skin and bottled like wine, the best luck-thief alive is hired to rob the one vault that has never lost a coin — and discovers the vault was never built to guard fortune but to eat it, that her own…
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At Alcott Academy, a handwritten List of six names has been left in the founder's chapel on the last night of every autumn term for a hundred and thirty-eight years — and the students it names go on to impossible success — but scholarship junior Bryony Ashby,…
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Four fifteen-year-olds inherit their grandmothers' recipe boxes and discover the margin notes do exactly what they say — just as a developer moves to raze the community center the recipes were written to protect.
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The town is drowning, you are twelve, and the only way to shut the water off is underneath it.
Read on Amazon →El pueblo se está ahogando, tienes doce años, y la única forma de cortar el agua está debajo.
Dr. Tobe Phelps writes young adult fantasy and science fiction, including the Awakenings series and the standalone The Phoenix Examination. His stories run on high-stakes trials, hard moral choices, and magic systems with rules that bite. He writes from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the high-desert light and wide skies find their way onto nearly every page.
Systems with limits, costs, and consequences you can reason about.
The rigged machine, examined piece by piece.
New releases and the occasional look behind the magic. No noise, just the books.