Mira Ashford

For six years, gods have been dying. Eleven down, one remaining—and every death leaves the power distributed to the nearest living person at the moment of death. Eleven people are walking through the world with divine fragments they cannot control, which are slowly killing them. Nessa does the laundry at Veth Caran, the monastery where the last god lives. She has been here for eleven years. She knows blood comes out with cold water, not heat. She knows the monastery's geography by heart, and she has annotated her mental map with a careful system: avoid the east tower (where the god of hearth and continuation lives), transit only through the connecting corridors, stay forty feet away at minimum, sixty feet preferred. Distance matters. The power transfers to whoever is nearest. She has been sixty feet away for eleven years. She has improved the laundry's drainage herself, submitted proposals for ventilation improvements that were respectfully ignored, and built a life in the northwest quadrant of the monastery that is comfortable, predictable, and entirely safe. Then the last god dies in her arms on a Tuesday. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had reasons—good reasons—that she couldn't have predicted would put her there. It doesn't matter. The power doesn't care about reasons. It cares about proximity. Now Nessa has inherited everything. The full power of the last god. And she has to decide what to do with it. GODSFALL is fantasy about power that arrives unwanted, about the careful geometry of avoidance, and about what happens when someone who has spent eleven years making sure she was never significant suddenly becomes the most significant person in the world. Nessa doesn't want to be a god. She doesn't want power. She wants to go back to the laundry and continue being sixty feet away from everything that matters. But the power cannot be refused. And the eleven other inheritors—the ones whose fragments are slowly killing them—need someone to gather wh