A Crown of Ash and Bone: In a dying world, the only thing more dangerous than the truth is the monster bleeding to hide it.

A dying world. A buried god. A fifty-year lie that is finally cracking.

For half a century, Vespera Vale, the legendary Warden of Citadel Veth, has carried a monstrous secret. The life-saving Wellwater that sustains the last remnants of humanity is not a natural resource drawn from the deep earth. It is the blood of a dormant, pre-human entity chained beneath the salt-crusted Ashfields—a god that Vespera herself subjugated to save her people.

But the entity is waking up.

As massive, violent tremors threaten to tear the Citadel apart from the inside out, a young Driftborn scholar named Eli Dalton arrives at the gates. Armed with brilliant, forbidden Threadwork magic and a journal full of damning mathematical proofs, Eli has deduced the horrific truth of Vespera’s regime. Now, Vespera is forced into a deadly game of cat and mouse with the only man who truly understands the atrocity she committed.

A Crown of Ash and Bone, the breathtaking third volume of Joseph Pepe’s The Salted Throne series, ratchets the grimdark tension to an absolute breaking point. Will Vespera bury the scholar to protect her people, or will she finally yield to the crushing guilt and let the waking god shatter the foundation of her civilization?

Perfect for fans of dystopian romantasy, morally gray rulers, and political fantasy steeped in devastating secrets.