Amber M. Clemente — The Love Series

01 — The Book

✦ Light Opens
Veiled Echoes Amber M. Clemente Cover reveal coming soon

They told her the sound of her humming was a flaw.

It was a frequency.

Aelira is twenty-three years old and has spent every one of those years learning to take up less room. She hums without knowing she's doing it. She hears the flat E in a refrigerator, the key a car horn is in, the minor third of a dog howling four streets over. Nobody was ever cruel about it. They were gentle. Every single time, in the same voice, from the front seat: that's enough now.

So she turned the volume down. She stopped painting. She put her grandmother's guitar against the wall and didn't touch it for fourteen months. She got very, very good at being easy to be around.

Then a man with impossible eyes sits down beside her on a bench in a botanical garden, and asks her to say her name again, and listens to it like it's a language he's been trying to learn.

Nyxus is not from her world. He is exiled, he is the last of his bloodline, and he has come across the Veil because something on the other side has been waking — and it has been waking to the sound of her.

In five realms she will be told she is a weapon, an inheritance, a prophecy, a mistake. Only one of them will tell her the truth:

She was never broken. She was the frequency the world was tuned to, before anyone remembered the tuning.

Slow burn Hidden identity Sound magic Forced proximity Touch her and die Dragon shifters Neurodivergent heroine

For readers of A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fourth Wing. Book One of THE LOVE SERIES, a four-book adult romantasy.

02 — The Sketchbook

Aelira’s Sketchbook

01 / 05

Why this series exists

My youngest hums.

She has hummed since before she could talk. In the car, in the bath, at the table — a small constant sound she isn't aware she's making, the way you aren't aware you're breathing. She stims. She moves the way her body needs to move.

I have never once asked her to stop.

The world asks instead. It says that's enough now in a hundred small ways, and not one of them has ever come from me. I've stood in checkout lines and felt it — the head that turns, the look that lasts half a second too long, the face deciding what she is in about four seconds flat. People who have never had to know a child like mine, and who won't try.

Here's the part I don't say out loud much. I was that kid too, in a different way. I was in a slow learning program at school. I understood the world differently than the other kids did, everyone around me knew it, and I felt it every single day.

So when she hums and a stranger stares, I'm not imagining what that feels like. I've been on the receiving end of that look my whole life.

Our worlds aren't the same. But they are both different from the one everyone else seems to be standing in, and that is the thing we share.

I think she hears something the rest of us don't. Some days that is beautiful for her. Some days it is genuinely hard on her, and I'm not going to pretend it's only ever the first one.

And here is the other thing about being built differently. I cannot explain this book out loud. Put me in front of a room and ask me what it's about and I will lose every word I have.

But I can build five realms, a magic system made of sound, a language nobody has ever spoken, and a hundred and ninety-four thousand words that hold together from the first page to the last. I can't explain that either. It's like trying to explain why some people can sing and some people can't. It just is what it is.

The speaking is a different thing. That one is an obstacle, and obstacles I know what to do with. I have spent my whole life working at what came easily to everybody else and slowly to me, and I have never once let being bad at something first be the reason I stopped. So I will be bad at talking about this book out loud for a while. Then I will be less bad. That is how everything I can do now started.

So I wrote a girl the world keeps asking to be quieter — and I made the sound she makes the thing that saves it.

She is named in this book and it’s the most beautiful name I have ever written.

For every child who has been called too much, too loud, too quiet, too strange, too sensitive, too different — and for every parent who has watched the world hand their child a word like a diagnosis and call it an answer:

This series was written for you.

What they call a disorder,
we are calling an inheritance.

Amber

03 — The World

The Realms of Aethelgard

Five realms, five frequencies, one chord — and it has been out of tune for a very long time.

Aethelgard is a world, not a place. The realms sit inside it, each one specialised down to a single quality, each reached by portal. Threading all of them is the Aetherium — a current you can hear before you can explain.

Sun

Aetheria Nova

Three ley-lines converge here — amber, sapphire, emerald — under a sky the same color as the first. Stone, heat, and very old power.

Memory

Veridia

The Archive realm. Seven chambers, a Pool of Truth, and silver data-veins running through the stone. Nothing that has ever happened goes unfiled.

Twilight

Elysia

Its harmonies pass tree to tree through the singing forests, so the whole realm is always faintly in chorus.

Ocean

Aqualon

Healing waters under a Coral Moon that blooms once every seven centuries. Its breezes carry serenity, and nothing here is given that has not first been trusted.

Fire

Ignis

The deepest note in the chord — the source every other realm's magic is a variation on. No sun; it makes its own light, the way a forge does.

And on the other side of the Veil

Terra

Not a realm of Aethelgard. A world of its own.

Its own sky, its own stars, its own stubborn certainty that none of the rest of this is real. The Veil opens between the two, and it does not open often, and it does not open for everyone.

The Aetherium runs here as well — thinner, quieter, easy to mistake for nothing at all. Most people live an entire life and never hear it. Aelira has heard it since she was four, and was told, gently and constantly, that it was a flaw.

You're standing on it.

05 — The Author

About Amber

Amber M. Clemente writes high fantasy romance for readers who want the slow burn to actually burn — the kind of book where two people spend four hundred pages not saying the thing, and you feel every page of it.

She writes from Michigan, mostly at hours no reasonable person is awake, in a house where somebody is always humming. Light Opens Veiled Echoes is her debut: 45 chapters, 194,000 words, five realms, and one confession in a language she had to invent before anyone could say it.

For twenty-three years her husband has been the steady thing underneath all of it — the one person who believed in the writing long before there was a page to show him, and who has never once asked her to love books, or worlds, or long quiet hours any less. Every realm in this series was built inside the safety he made.

Her two oldest cheered her through every chapter and never once doubted she would finish. Her youngest is the reason there is a book at all.

Book Two is drafted and Book Three is underway. That was the plan all along.

Currently: finishing Book Three, and reading everything with dragons in it.

Amber M. Clemente

06 — Get in touch

Contact

Readers

Questions, theories, and "when is Book Two out" are all welcome.
booksbyambermarie@gmail.com

Press & review copies

Bloggers, reviewers, and BookTok creators — information on early advance copies coming soon.
booksbyambermarie@gmail.com