Two worlds. One woman. No memories.
At twenty-two, Saeryn has scars she can't explain and a three year memory gap. An exotic family vacation away from her fractured past is meant to help her regain balance... except that the desert sands are calling to her with an eerie familiarity, and Malatrius—a stranger met by anything but chance—claims to know what happened during the times she can’t remember.
But to trust Malatrius’s words means believing in sorcery and traveling to another world. It also means putting her future in the hands of her father's longtime rival who has reasons to hate them both, because with every restored memory Saeryn realizes that not only did Past Saeryn keep secrets from both Malatrius and her father—she’d also made a choice that could threaten the desperate scheme she’d risked her life for.
And now Saeryn faces the same choice once more.
Losing her life will be a minor inconvenience, but losing her memories again could be the end of her.
Memories of Sorcery and Sand is a standalone character driven fantasy with dual timelines and told both in 1st and 3rd POV. If you like books that slowly unveil their mysteries and secrets, get your copy now!
Chapter 1 — The fleeting memory within the desert sand
The sands were calling to me, and I didn’t know why.
I leaned on the limestone-carved railing at the edges of the elevated dining terrace, the pride of the most luxurious hotel in Quathan, with a view of its splendid gardens. Yet instead of enjoying the sight of lush greens stretching out below me, my eyes kept escaping to the horizon marked by golden dunes.
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The simple reason was that I chose the exotic over the mundane. I’d never been to the southern continent before, so endless sands were new to me, while I’d seen enough gardens back in my homeland and in the neighboring countries when I accompanied my father during his scholarly travels.
But those dunes… There was something so familiar about them, like a dream almost forgotten with the first morning light. Except that it didn’t feel like a dream, more akin to a long-lost memory.
A memory.
My breathing became shallow and rapid, as always whenever something reminded me of what I’d lost, and my fingers were tight on the stone railing as if my imbalance was physical in nature. I fought to steady my thoughts and kept reminding myself that I’d never been to Quathan—or anywhere else in the southern continent—so I couldn’t have lost that particular memory.
Slowly, the feelings of panic and confusion passed, and I gently breathed out with relief. My father was right when he said the recovery of the mind would take longer than that of the body. Three years in a coma was long enough for any wounds to heal, but it seemed that I’d need even more to regain my inner peace.
The family trip to Quathan was meant to ease the process of recovery. Away from places in which every detail, scent, and sound seemed to set off an anxious reaction like I’d forgotten something important, I could strengthen my mind before facing the gaps in my memory once more.
And the sands… The sands were crippling my efforts—calling, teasing, and shaking my composure with their grains’ subtle movements in the breeze.
They brought foreign thoughts to the back of my mind, images of my bare feet sinking into the warm golden desert. Flashes of their presence were like glimmer-scaled fish in a stream: enough to know they were there, but not enough to catch any detail that would prove their existence.
Perhaps my own imagination, fed with too many stories of Quathan’s vibrant history or shaken by three years of stagnant blackness, was playing tricks on me, telling me of things that didn’t happen… That couldn’t have happened. It seemed my mind was desperate to fill the holes in my memories with any images that could put my world back together.
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