The Cursed Guardians of Ashborne

Museum curator Elena Ward is restoring a damaged artifact from Ashborne Library when her careful work awakens Cassian Valehart, a cursed stone knight sealed inside an ancient sarcophagus. Cassian remembers only one command: protect the key-bearer. When supernatural break-ins threaten the museum, Elena realizes the artifact may be one of the missing keys to the Fivefold Seal, and Cassian’s erased memory may hide the final vault’s location. Together, they must uncover who Cassian once was before the ancient threat beneath Ashborne learns how to use forgotten names as weapons.

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Four hundred years before Ashborne’s guardians awaken, stonecutter Sera Vane falls for Ronan Duskfell—a man with only three days left before he must surrender his human form to protect the city. As an ancient darkness rises, their forbidden love creates the vow that teaches the stone to remember.

After the events at Ashborne Library, witty events coordinator Mara Bell is determined to help Clara keep the reopened library from becoming a supernatural disaster zone. But when Mara discovers a sealed west tower that should not exist, she awakens Gareth Thornwing, a lion-headed gargoyle cursed to fight, protect, and obey without feeling joy, grief, or love. As enchanted relics vanish from the library and a hidden passage beneath the city begins to open, Mara must help Gareth recover the emotions stolen from him before the next piece of the Fivefold Seal falls into dangerous hands.

When rare-books librarian Clara Vale accidentally awakens a cursed gargoyle on the rooftop of Ashborne Library, she discovers the city’s most beautiful old building is hiding a magical prison beneath its floors. Ronan Duskfell has been trapped in stone for centuries, convinced Clara’s bloodline betrayed him, but Clara’s research begins to reveal a very different truth: his curse may have been an act of love, not treachery. As occult collector Silas Veyne hunts for the dangerous Grimoire of Unmaking, Clara and Ronan must choose whether to trust each other before the sleeping guardians beneath Ashborne wake under the wrong master.

Cathedral art restorer Amalie Cross is hired to repair a cracked stained-glass window from the ruined Chapel of Saint Orison, but the winged shadow figure trapped inside the glass is no painted saint. Lucien Noctis was cursed as a traitor, feared by the other guardians, and imprisoned in light and colour for centuries. As Amalie restores the window, she sees memories hidden in the glass: the night the Hollow King first broke through, the lie that divided the guardians, and the real betrayal buried inside Ashborne’s history. To save Lucien, she must prove that the most feared monster may have been the one guardian telling the truth.

Reclusive city historian Nora Finch has spent years collecting the missing pieces of Ashborne’s supernatural past, but even she is unprepared when streets vanish from memory, books rewrite themselves, and old clocks stop across the city. Her search leads to an abandoned clocktower, where she finds Elias Wren, the final guardian: a clockwork-stone sentinel erased so completely that even the other protectors forgot him. As the Hollow King begins breaking through the weakened Fivefold Seal, Nora must remember the guardian no one else can, while all five couples unite to remake the seal through love, living memory, and vows freely chosen.