SHADOWS OF THE LAMP • BOOK 3

The Eclipse of Erebus

By Vesper Starforge

In the gas-lit shadows of a city on the brink of eternal night, a disgraced battle-mage and a reckless scholar must trust each other with their lives—but trusting each other with their hearts may prove the greater danger.

Julian Thorne was once the Guild's most feared operative. Now he haunts the edges of his own life, relearning how to pour tea with one usable hand while his shattered magic flickers like a dying candle. He is a man reduced to brilliant, grinding approximations of the person he was—and he knows it. What he refuses to accept is becoming a burden to the one man he cannot afford to love.

Edwin Blackthorn arrived in Julian's world carrying white-cotton gloves, a baronet's pedigree, and an ancestral mystery that reaches from Victorian London's most exclusive gentlemen's clubs straight into the supernatural dark. When a tarnished silver coin reveals the trapped soul of Edwin's own ancestor—a woman who died preventing an occult catastrophe—their forced partnership ignites with friction neither man is prepared to survive intact.

Beneath Pall Mall's mahogany respectability, the Erebus Society is preparing to merge London itself with a realm of eternal shadow, timed to a solar eclipse that cannot be stopped. The trail leads through plague-pit catacombs, a fraudulent occultist's séance chamber, and the Guild's most forbidden vault—and every step forward demands more from Julian's broken body than he believes he has left to give.

But the conspiracy's final, devastating revelation isn't about secret societies or forbidden artifacts. It's about what Edwin's bloodline truly means, what Julian has been quietly sacrificing, and whether two men who have rebuilt each other from the rubble of their separate failures can survive a war designed to tear them apart.

A hurt/comfort historical MM romance featuring occult conspiracies, class-crossed devotion, and a heist beneath London's bones.