Arachne

ARACHNE: A PYRE OF ANGELS is an unforgettable work of epic fantasy. Kent David Kelly's haunting saga chronicles the death and afterlife of Elspeth Wight, a young Steam Age noblewoman whose beloved sister Christabel has died. Without Christabel, the heartbroken Elspeth forsakes her own beliefs. Tormented and reckless, she dares to believe in the whispers of her mysterious elder - and her childhood protector - Symon Adler. Symon swears to Elspeth that there is a secret afterlife, an unreachable Deathlessness, where Christabel's soul yet breathes even as its memory begins to fade. Symon promises Elspeth that she and her sister will be reunited in a dark and Gothic paradise, the eternal purgatorial netherworld known only as Embris. But Embris is the poisonous essence of temptation. It is the seductive fringe to insanity, the borderland of death. The Embris Gate is shut to all who refuse to sacrifice. In order to descend and embrace her sister's soul, Elspeth must forsake the world of the living. She must poison herself, and choose to die.And so her mortal body dies away. In rebirth, Elspeth's soul experiences a never-ending nightmare, a doll-twisted masquerade that spirals down into a truer reality than our own. Falling into the war-ravaged under-heaven Embris, Elspeth discovers the deepest secret of human existence: death is only our flowering, the soul's one invitation to a bittersweet eternity, one more wondrous than any mortal faith could ever dare to comprehend. Embris is revealed to Elspeth as a venomous Eden, where tortured spirits of the dead are enslaved as puppets and crusaders, forced into an eternal war between primeval horrors of the Light and a legion of darkest angels. Elspeth has no choice but to traverse this grim and resplendent underworld. To free the imprisoned soul of Christabel, she must force her way through poisonous forests, covens of ghost-hounds, and a decaying kingdom reigned over by murdered children. Beyond the reach of storms and madness she must confront her destiny - the terrible secret of the Wight legacy - where it lies buried away, beneath a cathedral carved all of ice. Yet the soul wars are endless, and Fates intervene. Elspeth is stolen away to champion the spider-goddess Atropos. The deepest of living nightmares draws her into a crusade against her sister's deceiver: an unconquerable Enemy. The price and spoil of war shall be her sister's soul. All around her, the last Light of Embris is dying, its warriors locked in an endgame between Atropos and the infernal. As Elspeth nears her the prison of Christabel there rises an Idolater - a dark godling and enslaver of the souls of butchered children - who covets the sisters' bloodline, reaping spirts in a mad dream to create a blacker paradise from the ashes of the old.In the name of love Elspeth finds herself torn in an immortal struggle not only for her sister's soul, but also for her own. For when you die for the one you love, death is only the beginning.