J.P. Barrow — Dark Fantasy

The Costs
of Magic

The Costs of Magic — Coming Soon

Every magic has a cost.
The most dangerous witches are the ones who decided
the cost was someone else's to bear.

When Gwen was ten years old, she watched through a pinhole as something murdered her mother and took her head. Fourteen years later, the killings have started again.

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“Every ingredient that can heal can also harm. What closes a wound can open one. What salves a burn can start a fire.

From The Costs of Magic

Three witches.
Three ways of moving through the world.

✦   Find out which witch you are   ✦

Every magic asks something in return. The cost scales with the work. The trouble comes from those who forget to pay attention—or from those who know the cost exactly, and choose someone else to pay.

Brewers
Give back to the earth
Patient, rooted, slow. They infuse magic into materials over time—potions, salves, tinctures. The work costs almost nothing.
Casters
Exchange with payment
Structured spells, deliberate destruction, careful sacrifice. They can rip energy from objects, from living things.
Innates
Spend from their own souls
Magic that flows through them like water fills a vessel. Each Innate carries a unique gift. The power moves. The price is paid in vitality.
✦ ✦ ✦
THE
COSTS
OF
MAGIC

Coming Soon

The Costs of Magic

Armed with a dead woman’s dress, a talking cat, and the ability to feel every lie like a needle under her skin, Gwen infiltrates the royal court she used to inhabit. What she finds there is worse than a monster.

It’s family.

A dark fantasy about inherited power and the people who weaponize it. About parents and children and the terrible things love justifies. About the courage it takes to let yourself be known—fully, honestly, without the disguise—when everything you’ve survived has taught you that hiding is safer.

Dark fantasy Fantasy witches Magic system Female protagonist Found family Morally complex Slow burn romance

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