The Shadowed Tribute
YA Fantasy Romance: A human outcast with lost Aether magic and a brooding Shadow Prince become unlikely allies amidst elite academy intrigue, dark betrayal, and a dying world.

In a world drained of color by the Creeping Blight, Grace’s life has been reduced to a single desperate goal: saving her dying sister. But when she’s torn from her blighted village and forced into service as a tribute at the Obsidian Spire—a dazzling academy of elemental magic—her mission takes an impossible turn. Powerless and alone, a human ghost in a world of gods, Grace learns that the price for her sister’s life may be her own soul.
At the Spire, she is caught between two rival princes. One, a radiant prince of light, offers kindness, protection, and the promise of a cure that seems too good to be true. The other, the arrogant prince of shadow from her own broken kingdom, offers nothing but scorn and cryptic warnings. Grace must choose her allies carefully, for when a terrifying, world-breaking power awakens within her, she discovers she is not a tribute, but a weapon in a war she doesn’t understand.
A devastating betrayal shatters her world, branding Grace a fugitive. Hunted by the very people she trusted, her only hope lies with the one person she was certain was her enemy. Thrown together by fate and forged in the fire of a shared enemy, this unlikely pair must steal a legendary artifact, master a power that could unmake reality, and stop a holy war before it purifies the world into ash. It’s a race against time where the fate of kingdoms rests on the shoulders of two outcasts who have no one to trust but each other.