Refined by Fire

Proudly rebellious, defiant of tradition, Mona attends university in the world’s greatest city, built by God’s own hand — before it was severed, before He departed the heavens, leaving in His wake a world and people transfigured. At the Hekademia Phragma she pursues a forbidden dream: become a scholar of antiquity, a role traditionally dominated by men.

However, Mona is marked a degenerate, both for her desire for women and for her ancestors’ sin. A cyclopes from the wild and barbaric Steppe, Mona’s people are the most hated in all the world, for once they ruled it as tyrants. Now a sinister church emerges, stoking this hatred, and putting at risk everything she has worked to achieve.

Mona finds doomed affection in the arms of Callisto, a noblewoman whose destiny denies her the company of her savage lover. Guided under the watchful eye of Professor Diogenes, a pillar of cyclopean pride and bound in an uncertain alliance with her kinsmen, Mona embarks on a journey into the heart and depths of the city, plunging headlong into the furthest reaches of rapture and despair.

Yet the Divine City is a place of wicked temptations. Pleasures of the flesh and promises of miracles entangle like snakes. Alchemy, a blasphemous art, has overturned the natural order. Bereft of guidance, the abandoned children of God seek eternity, no matter the cost. And Mona will discover that the taste of sin is ever sweet – and the unbroken chains of the past are not so easily undone…