Starshattered

They caged the sky. She learned to hear it. He spent a century keeping the stars alive. The debt is coming due.Eighteen-year-old Lyra Voss has survived the Ashfields by taking contracts no one else will touch. When her brother's stellar radiation sickness worsens, she accepts a job that could pay for his cure: steal a fragment from the Great Bear, the oldest caged constellation.The heist goes wrong. The shard fractures. The explosion binds Lyra's frequency to Orion, the Vault's legendary guardian. A man who has not aged in a hundred years. A man with a living star shard where his heart should be.The bond is called a Star‑Tether. If they separate too far, they fade. If they stay together, the only documented cure is to release the Great Bear's frequency, which would destroy the shard inside Orion's chest. He will die either way.Lyra refuses to accept that. With a former Court administrator, her stubborn younger brother, and a network of hidden Star Stitchers, she and Orion race across a decaying empire. From the lawless Ashfields to frozen Mirror Stations, they search for a forgotten technique called shardweaving. A way to heal the Great Bear without killing the host.But the Solar Court is hunting them. The immortal Gilded need the Star Rite to survive, and the Great Bear is their anchor. Commander Vestine, the Court's most relentless soldier, will burn the world to keep the constellations caged.Lyra and Orion have one chance: break into the Vault again, heal the Great Bear, and tear down the empire's lie that the stars are not alive. The cost will be everything they have, and everything they are becoming.Starshattered is a lyrical, politically charged romantic fantasy with forbidden magic, buried history, and a slow‑burn bond between two people standing on opposite sides of an empire that taught them both to be smaller than the truth.