The Lanterns of Everfall (en Inglés) - Celiel Dreadmyre

A thief who knows every shadow. A princess who refuses her gilded cage. A city whose light is fed by stolen souls.

Rook Marren has robbed merchant princes, cathedral vaults, and nobles too arrogant to believe danger could climb their walls. Everfall should have been another job: a glittering capital drunk on ceremony, wealth, and its own holy light.

Then Rook finds Princess Mara Veyne in the depths of a royal vault, searching for the same forbidden truth he has stumbled into. The soul-lanterns that keep Everfall bright are not miracles. They are prisons. The city's endless glow is drawn from the lives of its own people: workers, children, dissenters, and anyone the High Regent decides can be emptied for the greater good.

Malrec does not see himself as a monster. He believes grief, freedom, and memory are flaws to be engineered out of the world. With his machines, his soldiers, and his forced harmony spreading through the empire, he is close to creating an order no one can question because no one will be left whole enough to resist.

Rook and Mara flee the capital with proof of the atrocity and a price on their heads. Their rebellion carries them through industrial forges, damaged villages, hidden records, and the old territories of the Keld, where survival has already forced too many compromises. Along the way, they gather a disgraced knight, a wary hunter, a guilt-burdened scholar, and an engineer reckless enough to build the one device that might break Malrec's lantern network: the Honest Engine.

But the closer they get to the heart of Everfall, the clearer the cost becomes. Mara's family helped protect the lie. Rook may have been shaped by Malrec's own hand. And the light they mean to free may demand more than courage from the people who dare to touch it.

Dark, romantic, and atmospheric, The Lanterns of Everfall is a fantasy rebellion novel about stolen power, corrupted beauty, class division, bodily autonomy, and the dangerous hope of choosing who you are when an empire has already decided what you are for.