Welcome, reader.
You’re about to step into a world where vows carry power, monsters shift their skin, and few are quite what they seem. Villains do not always wear flesh, but they always wield power—until that power is stripped away.
The heroes you meet first will not be the ones you end with. But they will be people you root for, cry with, and believe in.
This is the first book in a romantasy trilogy told through dual perspectives:
Sharalyn, an elf on a quest through a world that would rather kill her kind than enslave them;
Bryson, a blind human bounty hunter bound by an oath he has yet to fully comprehend.
Along the way, you’ll encounter assassins, shapeshifters, a world that hates—and creatures that love.
You’ll find magic that costs something, tenderness that earns its place, and a slow-burn love story that doesn’t shy away from grit, grief, or humor.
As they tell you their story, you’ll sometimes cross time or place without switching perspectives.
Still, to help you stay tethered, each voice is marked with a symbol:
❧ Sharalyn
=•=•= Bryson
When a scene has changed but the voice has not, you’ll see: ***
The world within Of Relics and Reckless Hearts doesn’t pause to explain itself up front. Instead, it invites you to trust the unfolding.
You’ll meet your heroes in the midst of their lives—not knowing their full story, where they’ve come from, or what fuels their desire.
But as in life, the longer you walk with them, the more the strands weave into a tapestry of revelation.
So, take a breath.
Turn the page.
And welcome to their world.— E. L. Wood
❧ Sharalyn
We do not bury many. Elves are long-lived; most pass in Return—after many great oaks have fallen and risen again as saplings. To pass in Withering, whether by illness or by another’s hand, is unnatural. Abrupt. Harsh.
Yet in the first Moon Turn after the theft, the ûr’rithk—the deep urth that remembers every name laid within it—received more of us than the last Forest Age had asked.
We laid them upon pyres beneath the beeches: quiet faces, quiet hands, quiet everything. Smoke drifted through the boughs and clung to our hair like an accusation. Sap ran sticky along the bark, and ash sifted into the folds of our sleeves.
When the fires died, we returned their ashes to the ûr’rithk. I washed soil from fingers that would not come clean. I spoke rites until my voice frayed. When the last prayer left me, it did not feel like mercy. It felt like a ledger balanced by ash.
We said his name until it tasted of iron. Tharok. He came like a storm wearing flesh. And when he left, there were no children in the trees, no elders telling stories by the fire—only the smell of blood on pine needles and the echo of vows broken.
I clutched a journal to my chest, my hands trembling too much to steady it. The marks inside recorded what had been stolen: two Relics, artifacts of our covenant with the living world. To lose them was more than defeat. It was a severing.
He had taken not only the Relics. He had taken our certainty. The wards that had held since the Sundering unraveled like wet thread.
We do not speak of the Sundering in long accounts. We speak of it in fragments, as we lived it: gates burning, oaths broken, groves emptying beneath ash. It was the day the edain a úan rose against us, when mankind and monsters wore the same face.
When our hunters gathered, it was not to celebrate a kill. They gathered to build pyres.
I stood apart from the last bier, giving the mother room to press her forehead to the brow beneath the shroud. Sap streaked her hair from the limbs she carried for burning. When she lifted her face, something in it had gone still forever.
She did not curse. She said only, “Bring them back.”
She might as well have begged me to snatch the stolen from the hands of the one old songs named Thief of Oaks and new stories called the Draughtsman of Kilnor—the scribe of graves. Looking across land now pocked with mounds that should never have been, it seemed he was.
I did not answer. I could not. To speak would have been to promise.
Night fell. The pyres sank. The grove held its breath, and I held mine with it.
***
After the burial came silence.
For days, our people stayed rooted—unsure whether to rebuild or scatter. But I could not remain in that waiting. Action was the only thing that kept despair from calcifying in me.
So I tallied, as I had been taught to weigh choices:
To remain: safety for a time, but only until Tharok returned.
To leave: certain danger, yet with it the faint chance to reclaim what was ours.
The tally was uneven. And still, I chose.
Because some tallies are not numbers, but necessities.
Warriors, clerics, druids, elders. We burned and buried them all. Committing them to bless the ground from which we had came.
As I worked, I listened to stories from the few who had survived and the brutality they described frightened me.
On the third night, when the embers glowed blue and we were too weary to sleep, Elder Caevryn sat with his wounded arm in a sling and stared into the heat as though it might answer him.
He thought himself alone with only fellow warriors. I was in the shadow of the oil-press, not meaning to listen. And then I could not make myself stop.
“He cannot let it slip,” he mumbled to the fire or the wind. “That circle is a leash as much as a crown. The rage is not his without it. When it went crooked, his voice broke.”
A hunter on the other side of the embers snorted. “I remember the men who kept coming even after arrows went through their eyes. The crown did not keep them from dying.”
“No,” Caevryn said. “But it kept him from faltering.”
The words slid under my skin and stayed. I pictured Tharok in the ruin of our ward-wall, that iron circlet tilted, power snarling like a leash pulled too hard. My stomach went cold.
Later, Sarn Leth—too young to bear so many scars—told me a thing he had told no one.
“I was close,” he whispered. “Close enough to smell the pitch on his men. The Draughtsman smashed faces. I heard the hinge-snap followed by gurgling when their jaws broke. Horrid.”
The young man shuddered and continued, “He reached for the Relic, and the crown slid. For a breath it… screamed.” His fingers twitched as if the sound had stuck in them. “Everything around him stuttered. His hand did, too. Then he set it straight again, and the world remembered what it was meant to be.”
If pressed, Sarn would swear it was only the wind. If pressed, I would say nothing—only that I remembered the words.
What if the crown was no simple emblem? Perhaps it was a knife turned inward, its hilt buried in his own hand. Perhaps it was a chain he clasped about himself, as if daring it to tighten.
I do not know which unsettled me more: that he bound such a thing to his own head to wield it, or that, for a breath, it seemed the thing had bound him.
Either way, a weakness is a kind of door. I tucked the thought where I keep knives.
***
A Moon Turn is time enough for a grove to decide that grief is the work of the living. But I could not let it harden within me.
So I chose to leave—not by Conclave decree, not by farewell. Only one soul knew.
My talan-faar—my great-great-grandsire—waited beside the veil that had guarded our grove for generations. While the others slept, his lantern shone with the light of a glow moth. He spoke no words of parting—only lifted my wrist and pressed the stylus until the rune, shaped like a leaf, burned itself into my skin.
The sigil bit like nettles, searing bright with ward‑light before it sank to green.
“If a hand you do not choose grips you,” he said, “let the mark bite back. It will not save you from wolves, but it may make one let go.”
His fingers brushed my wrist, and my body betrayed me with a flinch. The touch was gentle, graced with love, yet memory carried other hands—rough, presumptuous, as if I were a door anyone might open. My face held still, thanks offered with care, though every instinct urged me away.
What belonged to me was gathered: a travel‑knife, fishing line, needle and thread, two changes of clothing I would not mind ruining. My mother’s brooch was sold for coin, and with it came a plain gray hood, a coarse cloak, boots with flat soles. Last of all, the flask from my brothers was hidden deep in a pocket, its runes ready to draw water from the urth itself, clear and cold wherever it was opened.
The taste of human coin became familiar soon enough—bitten to test its truth, bitter on the tongue.
At the ward-line, my talan-faar bent low to meet my eyes.
“You are young,” he said.
“Younger than the dead,” I answered.
“You will be turned away everywhere you go.”
“I will go anyway.”
“Hide your ears. They will mark you as one to be feared, hunted, and killed.”
Ancient fingers tucked them beneath my hood, deft as a weaver.
“You will find nothing like us out there.”
“I have found nothing like us here since the attack.” I knew my reply was not polite.
He nodded, pleased at the rudeness. “Good. Rudeness will keep you alive. Politeness is for those who can afford it. Trust no one. Humans will slay you as quickly as an orc. May the third root protect you.”
Better to leave as a stranger than remain as ash.
I bowed. He pretended not to see, then pulled me into his ribcage anyway. Tears stood in his eyes—but also something else.
Pride.
I was not banished, nor cast out. I chose this path because no one else would—their grief was too loud. No voice but mine commanded my steps, and I prayed it would guide me, not betray me.
“You are braver than I,” he said. “Be safe, my isa’ba’lin.”
My talan-faar called me his sister.
I left before I started weeping.