The Boy They Called Empty

The Measure never lies. That is what everyone in Emberfall believes — and the Measure says Kael Ashen has no magic at all.

Kael is thirteen, a dark-elf boy in a village of keepers, and his work is the Hall of Embers: a long hearth of named coals, one for every dead the village has ever loved, kept burning generation after generation. It is good work. It is also the work they give to a boy with no future in magic — the boy they called empty.

Then, one by one, small things in Emberfall begin to go wrong. A ward that should sing falls silent. And the great hearth-fire at the heart of the Hall — the fire that has never gone out — begins, for the first time in living memory, to fail.

The village must decide what Kael is worth. Kael, who has believed the Measure all his life, must decide whether a boy with nothing can try anyway — in private, for the Halls sake, at any cost to his pride.

The Boy They Called Empty is the first book of THE UNMEASURED, a young adult fantasy series about a boy the world measured wrong, the people who kept him, and the fire that would not go out.