The Severance
Mountain Bond, Book I
When Kivith dies saving strangers, so should Ryn — a dragon bond is neural architecture, a second heartbeat, and losing it is almost always fatal. Eskarith, who has outlived seven riders and fifty years of deliberate seclusion, offers something else: partnership without comfort, purpose without ease, and a bond built in the wreckage of grief rather than joy.
Ryn survives. But they wake up changed — less human, less in control, grieving in hailstorms and shearing winds instead of tears — and the same bond that kept them alive marks them as something the seven clans have no protocol for.
As the Council of Elders debate whether to study their Bond or end it, and the Guild tears through the crystal network for power, Ryn and Eskarith need to learn how to survive each other’s minds, and nurture a bond fragile enough that one wrong step could shatter it.
With the Council losing patience, a vote already moving through the shadows, and a disgraced Guild researcher crossing the Crimson Desert with stolen specimens and a deadly theory, their clock is ticking.
The bond they build in the dark is real, but will it survive the light?
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Kivith is dead.
The bond that should have died with him didn’t — and neither did Ryn. Now they have to learn what surviving really means.
The bond is real, but fragile enough that one wrong step could shatter it — and Ryn and Eskarith don’t have the luxury of learning slowly.
A mysterious prophecy. A pattern preserved in crystal.
While Ryn and Eskarith fight for their bond, someone is already moving in the shadows with a theory worth killing over.
The Severance is a story about what it costs to keep choosing to live after tragedy strikes, told across three volumes that move from an intimate, private grief to a conspiracy with the whole Mountain Domain watching.
Readers who love the telepathic, life-or-death intimacy of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, or the chosen bond and its psychological weight in Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar, will recognize the mechanic at this book’s core: a bond that isn’t just magic, but survival, identity, and grief bound into one.
Content warnings: on-page death and grief, body transformation, and political conspiracy.
The Severance, as the whole series, features LGBTQ+ characters and relationships as an integral part of society.