He sealed away the darkness. He made the sacrifice. He promised it would be enough.
He was wrong.
Nineteen hundred years ago, Celarion imprisoned a race of cosmic predators called the Veydran and saved the world. The cost was five gods, his wife Alyse sealed into the prison with them, and nineteen centuries of carefully balanced war to keep reality from tearing itself apart.
Now living as a mortal named Theron, he has four months to cleanse five corrupted Grand Shrines before the Veydran break free.
But the Shrines are failing faster than anyone predicted. Corruption spreads like infection through living veins. And Theron discovers the truth the gods never saw: the Veydran were never fully imprisoned. They were only waiting.
Sylphar commander Nyra Draeven leads her company through a landscape of bones and against a predator that speaks with the voices of the dead. She blames Celarion for breaking the world. She resents having to save it. But hatred will not cleanse the Shrines, and she is running out of time.
Hylie Caenon races to broker peace between humans and Sylphar before war consumes them both. The Dominion fractures. Old hatreds resurface. And every day she fails, the corruption spreads deeper.
Annea Caenon touches a fragment of corrupted altar in Luminarch City and begins to change. Black veins spread beneath her skin. Whispers promise power, purpose, and divine favor. She believes she has been chosen by a goddess.
She is wrong.
Celarion failed once. If a god was not enough, what hope does the world have now?
Dark, devastating, and relentless, A Shadow Watching is an epic fantasy of corrupted divinity, cosmic horror, and the terrible cost of carrying hope.
If you loved Brandon Sanderson's desperate multi-POV quests and intricate worldbuilding in Wind and Truth, Jay Kristoff's brutal emotional devastation in Empire of the Damned, or James Islington's layered conspiracies and ancient catastrophes in The Will of the Many-you'll be consumed by this story of fallen gods, cosmic predators, and a world racing toward its final hour.
