A Girl of Stone & Smoke: Daughters of the Volcano, #1

By Imogen Howson

Book One in Daughters of the Volcano

 

Her destiny is fire…and death.

 

Since seventeen-year-old Aera's holy powers manifested three years ago, she has known nothing but the temple, the priests, and the long training to make her into a fire priestess.

Everything about her former life she has had to forget, even Corus, childhood friend and the boy with whom she was beginning to fall in love. Able to transform her body into molten rock, she is destined to serve the volcano god forever, as lava-shifter, priestess…and executioner.

Before she takes up her ordained role, she must face her final test. Execute a criminal sentenced to death for the most unforgivable of all sins: blasphemy.

But it's no anonymous lawbreaker waiting chained at the centre of the labyrinth. It's Corus, sentenced for the crime of being a gargoyle, a winged stone-shifter. A gift akin to hers…except his gift is unsanctioned by the temple, his powers proclaimed unholy.

If she refuses the test, she will betray her god and condemn her family to disgrace. To pass it, she must kill the boy she loves.

 

21,000 words

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imogen Howson
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201872977

Imogen Howson

As a child, Imogen Howson loved reading so much that she not only read in bed, at the table and in the bath, but in the shower and—not so successfully—on her bicycle. She enjoyed books in a slightly unorthodox way, too: many of her childhood books have ragged edges where she tore paper from the margins in order to eat it. Imogen lives with her partner, their two young adult children, three cats, and two tiny dogs, in Cambridgeshire in England, where she bakes, runs, drinks coffee, and sustains an amateur but enthusiastic interest in all things make-up and skincare. She is a member of The Romantic Novelists’ Association. She no longer eats paper.

Book preview

Chapter 1

As Aera walked down to the entrance of the labyrinth, she descended into shadow. Walls rose on either side, cutting out the distant crash of the ocean and the glitter of sunlight blazing from the white sand of the desert.

Before her the entrance itself gaped onto darkness. The cold of it touched her skin, as if, in the blistering midsummer of the desert lands, it somehow breathed out a far-off winter.

Handprints marked the grey stone pillars at either side: narrow, delicate handprints, their surfaces smooth as glass, melted into the stone. There was little space left between them, but enough for Aera to slide her hands onto the unmarked stone as a hundred newly made fire priestesses had done before her.

She did so now, pausing on the threshold, the wintry breath of the labyrinth raising goose bumps on her outstretched arms, the gesture a promise to herself. I, too, will leave my mark on these pillars. I, too, will bear the god’s name.

Not yet. That was for later, when she would come back out of the labyrinth into the chill of early morning, out onto the sand when it stretched pale and colourless in the grey light of dawn. When she had passed the test. When she had taken up her birthright.

She let her hands drop, leaving the stone’s rough, dusty surface unchanged, and glanced back up the shadowed channel she’d walked down. The priests waited, watching her.

Ten years back the previous fire priestess elect had broken at this point, fled back up into the glare of the sun, sobbing, saying that she could not do it, she was unworthy, not clean enough. Although the story of that girl had been told as a horror and a warning ever since, Aera did not know her name. It had been as completely forgotten as if it, like the girl’s body, had been consumed, scoured through by liquid fire, clean after death if not before.

One of the two high priests, the older one, who’d taken Aera from her home three years ago, gave her the briefest of nods. Go on, the gesture said, as clear as words. You know your duty. You know what to do.

She did know. She left the doorway, tribute to a hundred other girls’ courage, a hundred other girls’ callings, and made the first step down into the labyrinth beyond the doorway.

She would come out a priestess herself, the hundred and first fire priestess, handmaiden of the god, consecrated by blood and fire. Or she would not come out at all.

The door grated shut behind her. It was automatic, of course, a piece of clever clockwork, and she’d known to expect it, but all the same she jumped a little, feeling the dark walls close her in.

This close to the surface, a small amount of light seeped through vents to reflect in silver gleams on the walls. But in front of Aera, stairs led downwards into complete darkness, and, despite her training, despite knowing every step of what she had to do, she found herself hesitating at the top of the steps, the silence suddenly ringing in her ears.

She took a breath of the cool underground air, willing her heartbeat to steady. She could not lose her way. This was not a maze, with false trails and dead ends, but a true labyrinth, formed of one path repeatedly curling back on itself until it was trapped at its own centre, forced into a shape like an eye staring up at the empty sky.

She’d walked it before, hundreds of times over the last three years. Even now, on this day of her final test, this day to which all her training had led, as she took her first steps down into the blackness her body fell into long-accustomed habits, her breathing slowing, her steps taking on a measured rhythm.

She no longer needed the trance-state that triggered her gift, but it was a comfort to let herself descend towards it as she descended the labyrinth steps, feeling the familiar calm like a succession of waves wash over and through her. It didn’t matter that she’d never taken this test before, never used her gift in the purpose for which it was made. She’d been trained for it, ever since, at fourteen, the priests had discovered the proof of her calling and taken her from her home. Her gift was the mark of the god’s possession: this was her birthright, she could carry out his will.

Following the smooth outermost curve of the labyrinth, Aera’s fingers came to a ridge that ran from floor to ceiling: the outline of the only other door in the labyrinth walls. Heat pulsed through it, stinging against her skin. Here was the entrance to the holy place, the volcano itself, cradling the lake of fire whose power ran in every fire priestess’s veins.

This door was neither entrance nor exit, but one of a pair that, raised, turned the passage between into a sluice, a channel opening straight into the molten rock at the heart of the volcano. Once it was open, lava would race into the labyrinth, blazing crimson silk threading through every whorl, flooding the passages before reaching the centre and being forced upwards in sprays and fountains, the eye of the labyrinth weeping liquid fire.

At the feel of heat against her hand, Aera’s entranced calm seemed to ripple, turning into a shiver, the precursor to the releasing of her gift. Against the blackness of the door, light bloomed, a hand-shaped incandescence. It reflected in the silver metal of the bracelet on her wrist, then seeped under it, spread until her whole arm glowed, lighting upwards, where the door stretched into darkness, and downwards onto her bare feet.

Her arm, at first pale as candle wax against the dark stone, seemed to catch colour from the heat she felt now under her skin, racing through her veins: turning the colour of marigolds, of sunset, of watch fires on the horizon. Her fingers, spread against the door, shimmered, flared—no longer flesh but molten rock, the living lava of her gift. Reflections leapt in the gleaming surface of her bracelets, of the door. If they had not been made of the same unmelting coldsteel that lined the labyrinth walls, they would be already surrendering to her touch, dripping from her like boiling honey.

The shimmer, the feel of the lava taking her, rose through her limbs. She