WHERE THE WORLD SPLIT
A debut romantasy where the magic system is the love story. Two rival heirs build worlds inside each other's minds — and fall exactly as they were meant to destroy each other. Slow burn, sharp politics, a heroine who was never going to lose quietly. For readers who like their enemies-to-lovers with a body count of feelings and no easy way out.
THE STORY
Two gods split the world in half. One took the north and taught it to fear. One took the south and left it to thirst.
Nahara is thirty-two and has already lost the biggest bet of her life. Her people are dying — the wells running dry, the land selling itself off to the betting houses of a kingdom that feeds on desperation. She has one chance left to save them, and it is not a war.
It is a competition.
The magic of this world is naming. You speak a world into being, part by part, and to win you must survive the one your opponent has built from everything they know about you. Every trial is a plane you must endure and unmake. Every plane your enemy shapes is a confession of what they see when they look at you.
And the enemy the North sends her against is their own prince: silent, controlled, giving away nothing. Building her worlds she was never meant to walk out of and one she was never meant to see.
Nahara came to win water for her people. She did not come to be known. But the planes bleed both ways and some doors, once opened, do not close.
And the competition is just the beginning.
ARC READER SIGN-UP
Fifty early copies of Where the World Split go out in January. If you like your slow burn earned and your enemies perceptive - two people building worlds out of everything they know about each other - I’d love to have you. Reviews are welcome, never required. Everything else is on the ARC page.
BY CHARLI BELLE
Charli Belle makes things - theater, shows, now books - that crack open a little space for people to rethink how they've been told they have to be.
She's been in love with fantasy since she was a kid spending whole afternoons alone in the woods, inventing stories and acting out every part, with a jaguar and a hawk for company. (They were invisible. They were also very real.) Not much has changed.
She's a Pisces, which explains most things. She loves people to an unreasonable degree, she can't leave a convention unbroken, and she's a little obsessed with the gap between how the world sees us and how we see ourselves - which is more or less what this whole book is about. She thinks romantasy is one of the best places we've got to get into desire, pleasure, intimacy, and the terror of being actually known, and she intends to stay a while.
Where the World Split is her debut and book one of a trilogy. She lives in the Northeast, has been just about everywhere, and has two kids and zero pets with no intention of getting one. Unless it's a horse. One with occasionally ironic and frequently funny things to say to her.