The Ashen Throne. The Chronicles of Emily - Book Two (en Inglés) - J. Zauhari;Jeffrey Zauhari

A crown won is only the beginning. Now comes the harder work - keeping it.

Six months after Emily Ashveil placed the Ember Crown on her own head, she is learning the uncomfortable truth about power: winning a kingdom is nothing compared to governing one. The council argues, the northern nobles push back, and somewhere beneath the grey ashen sea at the edge of her realm, something ancient and vast is slowly waking up.

When the fishing boats stop returning and the ocean turns the colour of ash, Emily's gift tells her what her advisors cannot: something older than the kingdom itself is stirring - a Predecessor, a being of deep cosmic scale, dormant for a thousand years, now waking confused and without a guide. Its awakening isn't malevolent. But something that large, reorienting in a world it no longer recognises, will not leave the land intact.

Reunited at last with her mother Seraphine - the woman who ran, who hid her, who spent seventeen years carrying the weight of that choice - Emily must also reckon with an unexpected arrival: Aiden Vayne, the man who was the villain, who spent two years in a lonely tower studying the very threat she now faces, and who comes asking not for forgiveness but simply for the chance to be useful.

What follows is not one battle but many, spread over years: land to heal, systems to restore, a kingdom to rebuild from the inside out - and at the end of it all, a journey to the Standing Stones of Vel, where Emily must speak to something that communicates in the language of shifting continents, and convince it that the world it tends is worth returning to sleep for.

The Ashen Throne is a story about what comes after the victory - the slower, quieter, more demanding work of becoming the person the crown requires you to be.

Perfect for fans of Spinning Silver, The Goblin Emperor, and A Memory Called Empire.

The hardest kingdom to rule is the one inside yourself.