Sparrow and Slayer

A love letter between an author and his only reader

By: John Kerry

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A banned book. A letter slipped under a door. A love story written in the margins between an author who cannot be named and the only reader he ever wanted.

The fortress has fallen. The masks are off. Camien Wade and the war he has ignited will swallow everyone Lydia Florence once called home.

Now stranded behind enemy lines, Lydia has nothing left: no rank, no mission, no side. Only a four-winged dragon that shouldn't exist, a rifle she's teaching herself to fire, and a banned publication called The Grey Sparrow — whose anonymous author has begun writing to her alone.

To the Reader.

What begins as a battlefield argument conducted in ink becomes something far more dangerous: a love letter disguised as literary criticism. He hides behind metaphors of wandering stars. She hides behind the words I am not complimenting you — merely stating a fact. Between them, in the white spaces of a handmade booklet, two people who cannot afford to want each other begin to say everything they cannot say aloud.

But the war does not wait for readers or writers. And when the night sky fills with fire, it will be a clerk on a juvenile dragon who decides the fate of an empire.

For readers who fell in love with the slow-burn intellectual seduction of Pride and Prejudice, the dragon-mounted warfare of Fourth Wing, and the gut-punch political revelations of Game of Thrones — this is the story where the pen is deadlier than dragonfire, and the most devastating weapon on the battlefield is a single sentence written in the margin of a banned book:

A path only has meaning when it is walked.

The author has finished writing. The reader has not finished reading.