$9.99
Geal Ros
by Ayden Payton
Language: English
Categories: Fiction » Fantasy » Dark
Content Rating: Older than 17
In the ancient elven kingdom of Avalon, where magic still lingers in the stones and beauty can be as sharp as any blade, Lady Salah Lyndros leaves the quiet of her family’s coastal keep for the glittering heart of the realm: the city of Lindaryon and its legendary Crystal Palace.
She is nineteen, newly come into her power as a mage, and already known for a beauty that unsettles as much as it attracts—silver hair like moonlight, eyes the pale blue of spring ice. Her parents have one clear purpose for the journey: to find her a suitable husband among the noble houses and secure the future of their newly raised line. Salah herself carries quieter ambitions. She dreams of the royal libraries, of forgotten spells and the deep knowledge the priesthood is said to guard.
What she finds is far more complicated than either duty or scholarship.
There is Arwinias Sunbourne, a Highland knight-in-training whose quiet strength and unexpected honesty stand out among the posturing young nobles of the court. There is the young Crown Prince Darayn, brilliant, lonely, and hungry for the same forbidden knowledge that draws Salah. And there is the Dreaming—the wild, consuming season of desire that every young elf must pass through, a time when passion is celebrated rather than constrained, and the heart learns its own dangerous lessons.
As the Long Struggle continues to bleed Avalon on distant shores, the Crystal Palace remains a place of exquisite beauty and quiet desperation. Alliances are made and broken over wine and whispered conversation. Ancient books refuse to yield their secrets. And Salah finds herself pulled between the life expected of her and the one she is beginning to want—between loyalty, ambition, desire, and a growing sense that the world she was raised to inherit is more fragile than anyone admits.
Told in Salah’s own voice, *Geal Ros* is a lush and intimate portrait of a young woman coming into her power in a world that both worships and fears what she represents. It is a story of beauty and its costs, of magic and memory, of love in its many forms—tender, fierce, forbidden, and fleeting. For readers who love richly imagined fantasy, complex characters, and the bittersweet edge where passion and duty collide.