A Map of Salt and Scars: To heal a broken soldier, she must navigate a dying world—and outrun the monsters sent to erase him.

In a world suffocating on mineral dust and rationed magic, survival is an act of defiance. Hope is a death sentence.

Lyra Lighthaven has built a solitary life mapping the deadly, salt-crusted wasteland of the Ashfields. Driven by a deep-seated compulsion to fix what is broken, she rescues Dax Crane—a dying Citadel soldier with experimental, failing magic woven directly into his bones. To save his life, Lyra must undertake a suicide mission: decipher a blood-stained map leading to the Drowned Citadel, a mythical sanctuary holding the world's last pure reservoir of magic.

But Dax's former masters have not let him go. An elite Retrieval Unit, led by a cold and relentless executioner, is tearing across the salt flats to ensure his experimental augmentations never fall into the wrong hands. Forced into a cramped transport with a ruthless scavenger who only cares about the payout, Lyra and Dax must navigate treacherous crystalline canyons, lethal atmospheric storms, and the crushing weight of their own inner demons.

A Map of Salt and Scars is the breathless, high-stakes second installment of The Salted Throne series. Joseph Pepe delivers a searing dystopian romantasy where trust is the rarest commodity, and the price of salvation is written in blood. Will Lyra's obsession to save Dax be their ultimate undoing, or will they survive long enough to change the fate of a dying world?