The Fire-Moon

The Khemtesh Empire is a country surrounded by desert, a place of many gods, regular floods, and barley ripening in the blistering sun. Ordinarily, it's a good place to live. But in the village of Hasmahi, the harvest is late. The priest is dead. The paper-cutters who harvested reeds from the lake have moved on, and so has anyone else who could easily flee. And the only child in the village is Teshar.

Teshar is eleven years old and a slave in her own house. She has already survived a dark magical ritual and supernatural encounters in the desert, but they left her changed, so much that her family suspects she's a demon. There's a sorcerer-priest coming to investigate, a dangerous man dedicated to the god of death. If Teshar really is carrying a seed of evil, his response will be quick, ruthless, and final. And the unquiet dead are hunting Teshar. As Teshar's village struggles to conceal crimes and horrors from the sorcerer-priest, Teshar is the only one who knows the truth of what happened, the only one who can confront the evil, and the only one who can save the dead—but first, she has to understand what she has become.

"The Fire-Moon" is a fantasy novella with a setting based loosely on ancient Egypt.