Following a cast of characters who surround Elvaria of the Kelvar Pass, The Umbra is a story of courage in unlikely places, betrayal by the closest of friends, and relationships that are worth fighting for. I hope you fall as deeply in love with it as I have.

summary

Elvaria’s oldest companions are shadows.

They pulse in her hands with life of their own, but she does not trust herself to control them. Instead she opts for daggers. They are fine enough weapons that do not talk back.

Elvaria possesses magic. Not like that of the mage or elves who the human king so deftly condemned from their lands, leaving the soils desolate. But something dark. Something other. Something her parents strived to understand while demanding she hide. So she does.

Until she cannot.

An unlikely guard in the Redlah slums’ most popular brothel, she protects her friends when men take their indulgence too far. But when magic folk invade the city, and a mob attacks the brothel. Elvaria has no choice but to swallow her fear, shut her eyes, and call upon her shadows. When her lids lift, the night explodes.

Evading capture, Elvaria and her three remaining friends flee, but they quickly are imprisoned by magic folk and forced to journey with them to the mage capital.

Fascinated by Elvaria’s abilities — and, perhaps, enamoured by her murderous glare — their leader, Lionel, demands that she join them. He sees her unique power as the answer to the life-draining darkness that the magic folk fight in secret — the true force laying waste to human villages.

As Elvaria learns about this darkness, though, she sees more than just an unsettling similarity to her own magic and grows worried that her shadows are fueled by the same deadly force. She forms a tenuous alliance with the magic folk so she might explore the limits of her shadow magic that she fears will be her undoing. 

But when the lethal darkness descends over the kingdom’s largest city, Elvaria knows that she could make all the difference and must trust her shadows to not add to the death toll. Will they protect their wielder, or abandon Elvaria as they drain the realm?