City of Trials

Lady Mad Max meets LGBTQ+ Hunger Games! With Nova's inevitable outcast from the Raiders drawing near, she'll do anything to earn a permanent place among her nomadic found family. When she sees a stranger alone in the grasslands, she knows this is her chance to capture an outsider and offer him as a tribute in an attempt to gain acceptance. But when they refuse her gift, Nova has to leave the safety of the Raiders and return the stranger to the gods' domain by crossing the ruined earth in a final bid to gain her family's favor and save herself from banishment. Fortunately, she won't have to travel alone. In addition to the captured stranger who is cursed by the gods, she leads a motley band of Raiders who have volunteered to accompany her in an effort to remove the stranger's threat from their people. Together they make their way to the City of Trials, where the world of humans and the home of the gods collide. Along the way, Nova finds her heart warring between two sides of who she could be: half is with Thoa the Bonecutter, the brooding warrior who seeks to protect her, the Raiders, and all she's known since they rescued her as a child. The other half embraces this stranger, Krew of the starfolk, his desire to see her free, and a chance for a strange new life she can hardly imagine. Putting herself on the line for them both, she finds herself in a deathmatch, facing things the only way she knows how: dealing death to all who endanger the fragile life she's creating for herself. In a city built on the blood of the strong, only the fiercest survive, especially when the gods turn out to be something far from what she'd envisioned and vastly more dangerous-other humans.