Ashes. Ashes. We Rise.

Second novel in the Velvet Warpath, a five-book sequence from Velinwood Publishing.

A queen who walked out of a safe lie builds a kingdom instead. It goes up fast and without permission - rooms appearing overnight, hallways extending, doors turning up in walls that were solid the day before.

The court assembles around her. A rabbit documentarian who files complaints against himself and rejects them on procedural grounds. A squirrel princess in a walnut crown, issuing decrees by wooden spoon. A goat archivist who files the record dutifully, or misfiles it, or eats it. A silent strategist who is never early. And the architect whose writing makes things real.

For twenty-two chapters the kingdom is happy. Then the record starts going wrong - a pen missing from an empty office, a page consumed in front of witnesses, pages resewn in a hand matching no bindery record.

Found-family warmth, court satire, and slow-building dread, closing with a four-voice archive that reads the whole book differently.

Follows The Pact of Exit. Interlocks with the three-book parallel series The Hidden Record.

Published under the pen name Her Majesty of Ink and Exit Wounds.