The Last Ember

When Maren Ashford drives through a fog that moves against the wind, she doesn't yet know she's returning to a legacy written in smoke. Her grandmother Eleanora has died, leaving behind the crumbling Ashford estate, and a sealed chamber no one in the family has spoken of for generations. With the lawyer Theodore Grimm and the wary parish keeper Brother Whittaker at her side, Maren begins to unravel what the Ashfords have hidden: a single ember, impossibly old, the dying remnant of a fire her bloodline swore never to relight. But embers do not stay buried. As the fog thickens around the estate, a presence stirs, an entity of cinder and memory called only the Cinder, hungering for the family that once fed it. Sable Morrow, a woman already claimed by the smoke, warns Maren that the ember remembers every daughter it has ever touched, and it has begun to whisper a new name. Caught between Dr. Cassius Reed's dangerous offer to study the entity and the desperate warnings of those who love her, Maren faces an impossible choice: surrender the ember and sever the Ashford line forever, or feed the flame and risk becoming the Daughter the Cinder has been waiting for.