J.M. Corvinus
Dissonance
Book One of The Silence Between, where it all began.
A family holds. A country tears. A quiet figure walks the road.
In a town that calls them demons, a woodworker and his wife raise two abandoned corvae boys as their own.
Asher runs hot. At ten he scorches spoons. At thirteen he can throw fire from his hands, and the town has been waiting years for an excuse. Cawsley cannot change his shape the way his brother can, but he hears music where other people hear silence, and he will do anything for a word of praise. When the money runs out, a monastery offers to take the quiet one. A merchant’s cart takes the loud one. And in the capital, a young Sovereign who kills monsters with her own hands is building a peace out of blood and ledgers that will need boys exactly like them.
Asher learns what the road makes of anger, and what it costs to pass for human. Cawsley learns what a sanctuary keeps in its cellars, and what his hearing is for. Back in Briden, their father begins to hear a patient voice that sounds too much like his own, and it is so very helpful.
The town always knew what those boys were for. Their family spent years insisting otherwise. Now the war is coming to Briden to settle which of them was right.
Dissonance Art Gallery
Artwork by J.M. Corvinus.
Reverie
Book Two of The Silence Between
Available now
Twenty years after the war, Asher Locke has built a school for the children the kingdom is afraid of.
For one amber year, it almost works. His son Sable studies the stars and finds something looking back. His daughter Linnea is too bright and too bored for the rooms that love her, and keeps her sharpest questions to herself. Corrin, who has spent his life hiding what his hunger wants, leaves for the mountains to learn to fight without becoming it. Cawsley teaches fencing to students who go quiet when he enters a room. Between lessons, kitchen tables and first kisses, the family begins to believe it has built something that will last.
Then students start dying in their beds.
The school locks its doors and hunts a killer among its own. Beyond its walls, the guild has found a door in the foothills that should not exist, and the people who go through it are not coming back. When the Lockes volunteer to follow, they are hoping to end the fear reaching into their home. Beneath the mountain they find a buried city, an ancient grief, and something that has been waiting a very long time for a boy like Sable.
The people who built the school spent years teaching their children that they can choose what they become. Under the mountain, somebody else is about to choose for them.
For readers who like dark academy fantasy, emotionally devastating found family, cosmic horror, slow-burn romance, and characters who love each other fiercely enough to break the world trying to save it.
Follow @jmcorvinus for release updates.
Antumbra
Book Three of The Silence Between · Solipsis, Volume One
Coming soon
They went under the mountain to bring their people home. They came out on the far side, in a kingdom of foxes that no one from Thaeron has ever seen.
Asher Locke is holding two hundred wounded behind a wall of green timber, and winter will not let him carry them back over the pass. When a village across the line offers his envoys a night of welcome, he sends his son and his brother. By morning the village is dead, and Cawsley walks out of the ruin with the voices of his mother’s killers in his head.
The queen of the foxes comes to Asher’s wall on foot to answer for it. Her king offers something better than an apology: a winter as honored guests in a city grown from living wood, and a partnership that could make two old enemies rich.
So the Lockes go to court, where every kindness is genuine and every word is written down. Corrin meets a woman who calls his fangs beautiful, under the same roof as the girl who has always called him hers. Linnea is found by people in masks who know what her magic can do, and want it. And Nero smiles through every supper, guarding a secret that would cost him the only family he has ever had.
Somewhere beyond the city, Cawsley is hunting those voices one by one. His family came to make a peace. He is coming to settle a debt, and every trail leads to the table where they sit.
Follow @jmcorvinus for release updates.
J.M. Corvinus
J.M. Corvinus is a debut author who started writing the way a lot of people would — because something had to be done with grief.
Dissonance began as an attempt to hold on to his mother and the stories he has been telling himself since he was small. The characters in the Locke kitchen, the songs the boys carry, the town that tolerates a family it does not quite allow — all of it is, in its own careful way, a way of keeping her in the room. The Silence Between is, more than anything else, a thank-you letter: for the life she built, the patience she spent, and the quiet she taught him how to listen for. It is the book he wanted to write his mom to immortalize her.
Dissonance — Book One of The Silence Between — is available now. Follow @jmcorvinus on Threads or Instagram for news and reading notes.
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