Read an extract from Daughter of No Worlds by Carissa Broadbent
Ripped from a forgotten homeland as a child, Tisaanah learned how to survive with nothing but a sharp wit and a touch of magic. But the night she tries to buy her freedom, she barely escapes with her life.
Desperate to save the best friend she left behind, Tisaanah journeys to the Orders, the most powerful organizations of magic Wielders in the world. To join their ranks, she must complete an apprenticeship with Maxantarius Farlione, a handsome and reclusive fire wielder who despises the Orders. The Orders’ intentions are cryptic, and Tisaanah must prove herself under the threat of looming war. But even more dangerous are her growing feelings for Maxantarius. The bloody past he wants to forget may be the key to her future . . . or the downfall of them both.
Tisaanah will stop at nothing to save those she abandoned. Even if it means gambling in the Orders’ deadly games. Even if it means sacrificing her heart. Even if it means wielding death itself.
READ AN EXTRACT FROM DAUGHTER OF NO WORLDS
It begins with two souls who find themselves suddenly, utterly alone.
Evaluate. Judge. Act.
The young man let the words echo like a second heartbeat.
He did not allow himself to acknowledge the possibility that he was going to die here. Not even as he slipped on blood, stumbled over bodies, mentally counted the men and women that had followed him into the city but would not follow him out. Not even as possibility crept closer and closer to certainty.
He was twenty-one years old. He had been in too many battles to count. But this? This wasn’t a battle. This was a slaughter.
Evaluate. Judge. Act.
He pressed his back against the outer wall of a townhome, peering around the corner down a narrow city street. The roads were densely populated with crooked little houses that squished up against each other. Terrified faces peered from within them. Mothers tore their children away from the sight of steel and magic and fire mingling in a terrible, deadly dance.
Deep beneath his thoughts, the voice chuckled.
Shut up, he told it, and launched himself back into the fight. He flew through the streets, whispering to the flames beneath his breath, coaxing them to him. They complied eagerly, furling around his hands and up his arms in spirals. He yanked them out of houses and off the streets, away from thin skin and fragile bones.
But there was too much. It consumed his energy and his focus. So much so that he didn’t even have time to evade when a sharp pain split his back. The warmth of blood melded with stinging, salty sweat.
Act, act, act.
He gritted his teeth and spun in a well-practiced counter before the rebel could land another strike. The body hit the ground in a clumsy tangle of limbs. He didn’t look at her face, grateful that it was covered by a mass of curly brown hair.
As if awakened by the smell of fresh blood, the voice leapt inside of him. {Kill it!} it hissed, throwing itself against the surface of his thoughts like claws gouging at a door.
No—
He paused a split second too long. A force collided with him, knocking him back into an alley. Instinct kicked in. His hands were already drawing his blade, poised at his attacker’s throat before he even turned his head to see—
“Don’t you dare kill me.” A warm, familiar voice murmured against his ear. “There are hundreds of rebels here who would love to do that instead.”
That voice. It was, in that moment, the most beautiful thing the young man had ever heard.
He exhaled a silent sigh of relief, dropping his dagger as he turned. “Where the hell did you go?”
The young woman greeted him with an unwavering, steely gaze. Her irises were so fair that they melted into the whites of her eyes, leaving pinpoint dark pupils watching him in an assessing stare. Soot and blood painted her cheeks, and her white braids were tangled and dirty. A coat hung from her shoulders that had once been blue. Now it was so spattered with red that it edged on purple, the stains crawling over the crescent moon insignia on her lapel.
The sight sent his heart lurching to his throat. “How much of that is yours?”
“How much of that is yours?” “That bad?”
“Very bad.”
“Wonderful,” he grumbled. He’d hoped the wound wouldn’t be as deep as it felt.
She turned him around, hands gripping his arms, her face inches from his. “You’re bleeding a lot. You don’tfeel that?”
Not anymore. He shook his head. The movement tilted the floor, as if the world were a ship preparing to capsize. He imagined the sun on the back of his jacket cleaved in two by whatever blade had struck him, the halves sliding, separating in the sky—
“Hey.” Her fingers were at his face, snapping in front of his eyes. She looked angry, but he knew her well enough to know that it only masked her fear. Just as she had been when they had ventured into the forest for the first time as children, when they had wandered around lost for hours until—
“Wake. Up.” This time she shook him, too. “Stay with me.”
He felt something encroach at the edge of his thoughts—a brush of her presence. Her magic reaching into his mind. “Don’t do that,” he growled.
The voice chuckled something disgusting, far away.
“I’m just checking on you.” Her presence retreated as the line between the young woman’s eyebrows deepened. “I went to the west end of the city. So many dead.”
So many dead.
The young man blinked away the image of the little faces peering from shattered windows.
“We have to retreat,” he said. “There are too many townspeople here for this. I can take the fire as we go.”
“Their leadership is here. Retreating isn’t an option. Too good of an opportunity.”
He almost laughed. Bitter and ugly and humorless. “Opportunity? No, this is—”
“They chose to start this here, in one of their cities,” she spat. “If they want to shit in their own beds, they can lie in it.”
The words hit him like a strike to his gut. He wasn’t sure if it was her callousness or the blood loss that made his stomach clench with nausea.
“These are still civilians,” he shot back. “Rebellion or no.
These are people.”
“We have options.”
“Not with what I’ve seen.”
“We have you,” she whispered. One hand traveled to his face, hovering over the muscles that clenched his jaw. “We have you.”
A shiver shuddered through his deepest recesses. He stood there, lips parted but unable to conjure words strong enough to match his revulsion.
The best he managed was, “Hell no.”
Her mouth thinned. If he had been paying attention, he might have noticed her caress migrating to his temple, pushing aside strands of black hair.
“We don’t have a choice,” she whispered. “Please.”
“No. We’re in the middle of a city. And—”
And what? And so many things. Too many to encapsulate in words. Just the thought of it prickled shards of icy horror in his veins.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “But the destruction would be— and I—”
It was probably the first time he had ever failed to do what was in the Orders’ best interest. But all he could think about were those little faces in the windows.
She looked for a moment as if she might push further, but then something shifted, softened, in her expression. Her lips twisted into a sad smile. “That bleeding heart will get you killed one day, you know.”
Maybe, the young man thought.
{Likely,} the voice whispered.
There was a long silence. And then, finally, she simply said, “I am your commanding officer.”
He almost questioned his sanity, questioned whether he heard her correctly. “You’re—what?”
A laugh skittered through his thoughts, jeering at the dread that clenched his heart.
“Targis is dead. I saw him.” She looked up at him with bright eyes. Reflections of flames glittered in their dampness—the only sign of emotion. “With him gone, I am your commanding officer. And I command you toutilize the full extent of your abilities.”
Her words split him in two, a pain so sharp that it felt as if someone had grabbed the top of his spine and ripped it through his skin. “Nura—”
“I command you to do it.”
And that was when he noticed her hand at his temple. When he noticed her magic reaching further than that, into his thoughts, to that door that he had slammed shut, nailed shut, bolted shut—
“No.”
The word was the only thing that he could choke out in one ragged gasp, the rest dying in his throat as he felt her reach deeper into his mind.
It was the one thing she swore she’d never do.
He threw whatever remaining strength he had into reinforcing his mental walls, but he would never be as strong when it came to these things as she was. Her magic was born in the world of thoughts and shadows, while his was far more suited to brighter, more immediate forces. Especially now, with more and more blood rolling down his back, and that creature fighting desperately to get out.
“Stop—” A burst of pain blinded him. He felt her pry open that door, crushing it, discarding it.
Her lips formed the word “sorry,” but if she said it aloud, he didn’t hear it.
{So sweet,} the voice whispered, so near and so real that goose bumps rose on the crest of his ear. {You always try so hard.}
Fuck you.
His hands dropped from her arms. Fingers stretched. Then clenched, releasing a cacophony of cracks.
If he was capable of speaking, he would have told her that he would never—never—forgive her for this.
But he was not capable of speaking. He was not capable of anything but hurling himself against his own mental walls, over and over again, in a desperate attempt to regain control.
Even as it slipped further from his reach.
Even as his palms opened and he was blinded by fire and fire and fire.
Daughter of No Worlds is published by Tor Bramble on 16 October 2025
