Character-driven adult dystopian science fiction with a central, emotionally intimate, open-door romance and a vivid science-fantasy atmosphere.
About the Book
The war for Kraji’s freedom is over. The war for its survival is only just beginning.
After thirteen years of occupation, the last soldiers of the Eastern Offensive have been driven from Kraji’s lands. But victory has left the country exposed—and looking to the two people who never meant to save it.
Remedy started a revolution to save one life, then spent months saving thousands more. Now Kraji wants her to become its general, the position once held by her mother, the one who never believed Remedy was fit to lead. She would rather return to her operating room than inherit a legacy built on impossible expectations. But with an enemy army massing beyond the border, her brilliant mind may be the only weapon that can give her people a chance.
Nith should be celebrating. The former slave is now a decorated officer reunited with the daughter he was forbidden to see and living with the woman he risked his life to be with. But freedom and honor cannot silence the past. As old traumas surface and his control begins to slip, the winged super soldier discovers that violence is a far easier path than healing.
When a betrayal carries Remedy over the border and places her within reach of the ruler preparing to reduce Kraji to ash, the country is left without hope, and Nith is left without the one connection keeping him together. Now he must embark on a secret mission into enemy territory to find Remedy before it’s too late—for her and Kraji. The only question is: Does she want to be found?
Kraji’s future depends on the two people who saved it. But before they can protect its fragile freedom, they must face ghosts that refuse to die.
What Kind of Book Is Mourning Fire?
Mourning Fire is character-driven adult dystopian science fiction with dual protagonists, a central open-door romance, political tension, postwar trauma, and a science-fantasy atmosphere.
The novel begins in the aftermath of revolution but expands into a larger story of pursuit, betrayal, navigating enemy territory, political power, and the machinery of an empire. Its external conflict is substantial, but every major event remains grounded in the internal struggles of Remedy and Nith.
Their relationship is no longer defined primarily by forbidden attraction. They have chosen each other and begun imagining a life together. The romantic tension now comes from separation, competing responsibilities, unresolved trauma, and the fear that surviving the next war may require them to become people the other will no longer recognize.
Mourning Fire remains dystopian science fiction rather than a traditional romance novel or romantasy.
What to Expect
- An established, emotionally intimate romance
- Dual points of view
- Lovers separated by betrayal and war
- A brilliant but deeply uncertain female protagonist
- A reluctant leader confronting her inherited legacy
- A genetically engineered hero struggling with trauma and moral injury
- A powerful man afraid of the violence inside him
- A hard-won father-and-daughter reunion
- Found family and complicated loyalties
- Postwar reconstruction under an approaching threat
- A journey beyond the borders of Kraji
- Political intrigue, pursuit, captivity, and rebellion
- Morally complicated enemies
- Questions about the difference between a hero and a weapon
- Science fiction with the immersive atmosphere of fantasy
- Emotional devastation balanced by tenderness, dark humor, and hope
The World of Mourning Fire
Kraji is free—but freedom has not made it safe.
After thirteen years of occupation, the nation must rebuild its military, infrastructure, identity, and trust while preparing for the Eastern Offensive to return. Its people have spent generations defining themselves through resistance, sacrifice, and reverence for the dead. Now they must decide what their culture will become when survival demands change.
Beyond Kraji’s borders, the world is more complicated than the division between conqueror and conquered suggests. Armies are built from coerced soldiers. Entire communities survive by disappearing. Advanced technology exists within civilizations forced backward by war and resource collapse. The distinction between enemy, victim, hero, and weapon becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
The Angels remain central to this conflict. These winged supersoldiers are genetically engineered humans rather than supernatural beings. Created to protect Kraji, they must now determine whether freedom has given them the right to become something other than the weapons they were designed to be.
Remedy and Nith
Remedy Ivanov: The Healer Asked to Lead
Remedy can reproduce almost any skill she witnesses. She can perform impossible surgeries, create advanced technology from scraps, and conceive solutions no trained general would consider.
But competence is not confidence.
Her mother raised her beneath impossible expectations while making it clear that Remedy would never be worthy of inheriting her command. Now the country Remedy helped liberate expects her to accept that very position.
Her struggle is not about discovering whether she is capable. It is about believing that her abilities—so different from her mother’s—are enough to defeat an enemy more powerful than anything their country has ever faced.
Nith Oblem: The Weapon Trying to Heal
Nith possesses massive wings, inhuman strength, enhanced senses, and a body engineered for war. He survived Kraji’s fall, thirteen years of enslavement, separation from his daughter, and the shame of being blamed for a nation’s defeat.
Now he is free, honored, and reunited with the people he loves.
He should finally be able to live.
Instead, the violence that protected him during war begins following him home. As trauma, guilt, and rage erode his control, Nith must confront a battle strength cannot win: deciding whether he is a man who can wield a weapon or a weapon pretending to be a man.
The Relationship at the Heart of Mourning Fire
Remedy and Nith crossed laws, traditions, and the boundaries of their divided society to choose each other.
In Mourning Fire, their relationship becomes more emotionally and physically intimate. They are no longer wondering whether connection is possible; they are attempting to build a future after lifetimes spent believing they would never have one.
That future remains fragile.
Remedy responds to fear by withdrawing, distracting herself with work, and running from responsibility. Nith responds by pursuing danger, sacrificing himself, and becoming the weapon others need. When betrayal separates them, both must confront the habits that once helped them survive but now threaten their country, their relationship, and the people they are trying to become.
Their love cannot heal them by itself. But it gives them something worth changing for.
Genre and Style
Genre: Adult dystopian science fiction
Subgenres: Character-driven science fiction, biotech science fiction, political science fiction, post-collapse speculative fiction, and romantic science fiction
Romance: A central, established-couple romance with open-door intimacy. The relationship is inseparable from the political story, but the novel is not structured as a conventional genre romance.
Setting: Far-future Earth after two centuries of global conflict. The story centers on the newly liberated nation of Kraji, where political survival, cultural identity, ancestral tradition, and advanced biotechnology collide.
Style: Emotionally direct and psychologically intimate, with visceral prose, dark humor, dense cultural worldbuilding, and high-stakes political conflict grounded in personal choices.
Tone: Gritty, suspenseful, morally complex, romantic, and emotionally intense, with hope earned through difficult change rather than easy victories.
Core Themes
Mourning Fire explores:
- Trauma and moral injury after war
- The difference between surviving and healing
- Leadership and inherited expectations
- Identity after oppression
- The psychological cost of liberation
- Love after survival
- Duty versus personal desire
- Violence as both protection and self-destruction
- Parenthood, guilt, and repairing damaged relationships
- Found family and unexpected belonging
- The difference between heroes and weapons
- Political power and manufactured enemies
- Cultural survival in a changing world
- Whether people can change without losing themselves
- Hope as something chosen rather than discovered
Who Should Read Mourning Fire?
Read Mourning Fire if you are looking for:
- Character-driven science fiction with emotional depth
- Adult dystopian fiction with a central romance
- An established relationship tested by trauma and separation
- Open-door intimacy within a larger speculative plot
- Complex female protagonists confronting power and expectation
- Damaged heroes trying to heal without losing their strength
- Literary-leaning speculative fiction with action and political tension
- Philosophical science fiction about freedom, identity, and humanity
- Postwar societies struggling to rebuild
- Deep worldbuilding grounded in culture, history, and consequence
- Morally complicated characters with no easy answers
- Stories about the messy boundary between heroism and violence
- Science fiction that carries the atmosphere and immersion of fantasy
- Emotionally devastating books that still leave room for hope
- Books that feel like therapy and emotional damage at the same time
Readers who want intimate character relationships, a widening dystopian conflict, difficult moral questions, and emotionally damaged people fighting toward hope will feel at home in Mourning Fire.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Mourning Fire dystopian science fiction?
Yes. Mourning Fire is adult dystopian science fiction set immediately after the liberation of a country that endured thirteen years of occupation.
The story explores political oppression, postwar instability, cultural survival, coerced armies, inherited power, and the psychological effects of living under violent systems. It combines these dystopian elements with character-focused storytelling and a vivid science-fantasy atmosphere.
Do I need to read Death Remedy before Mourning Fire?
Yes. Mourning Fire is Book Two of the Akman’s Angels Trilogy and directly continues the plot, character development, and central relationship established in Death Remedy.
Readers should begin with Death Remedy. The companion prequel, Pre Mortem, provides additional history but is optional.
Does Mourning Fire have romance?
Yes. The established relationship between Remedy and Nith is one of the novel’s central emotional and narrative threads.
Their romance includes tenderness, yearning, conflict, and physical intimacy. Their relationship develops alongside Remedy’s leadership struggle, Nith’s trauma, and the threat facing Kraji rather than existing as a separate subplot.
Mourning Fire is not a traditional romance novel, but the story would not function without their love for one another.
Is the romance in Mourning Fire slow-burn?
No. Remedy and Nith’s initial relationship develops in Death Remedy. By the beginning of Mourning Fire, they have already chosen each other and are attempting to build a life together.
The romantic tension comes from emotional vulnerability, separation, unresolved trauma, conflicting responsibilities, and uncertainty about whether they can change enough to share the future they want.
The most accurate description is an established, emotionally intimate, open-door romance under pressure.
Is Mourning Fire romantasy?
No. Readers who enjoy romantasy may connect with the central romance, winged hero, immersive world, heightened atmosphere, and intense emotional stakes. However, the story contains no magic.
The Angels are genetically engineered humans, and the worldbuilding is based on biotechnology, lost technology, resource collapse, political power, and cultural transformation.
Is Mourning Fire character-driven or plot-driven?
Mourning Fire is strongly character-driven, but it contains more external movement and a wider conflict than Death Remedy.
The novel includes betrayal, captivity, pursuit, navigating in enemy territory, military threats, political confrontation, and action. These events remain inseparable from Remedy’s struggle with leadership, Nith’s worsening trauma, and the pressure placed on their relationship.
Is Mourning Fire only about the aftermath of war?
No. Postwar recovery is one of the book’s central concerns, but victory does not bring lasting peace.
The novel begins by asking what happens when people who have spent their lives surviving are suddenly expected to live. It then complicates that question by placing those same people under a new and potentially overwhelming threat.
Is Mourning Fire hopeful?
Yes—but its hope is hard-won.
The novel confronts grief, trauma, violence, guilt, and the lasting consequences of war without suggesting that love or victory can erase them. Its hope comes from people choosing to change, repair what has been damaged, and continue reaching for one another even when healing remains incomplete.
Does Mourning Fire complete the series?
No. Mourning Fire is the second book in a trilogy. It resolves its primary conflict while opening the larger threat that will drive Life to Death, the concluding novel.
Reading Order
- Pre Mortem — optional companion prequel
- Death Remedy — Book One
- Mourning Fire — Book Two
- Life to Death — Book Three
About S.T. Seitz
S.T. Seitz writes emotionally immersive science fiction about broken people, fractured worlds, and hope that refuses to die.
With a background in biology and a lifelong fascination with living systems—human and otherwise—she creates character-driven speculative fiction that combines big ideas with deeply personal stakes. Her work explores grief, power, identity, moral ambiguity, and the dangerous ways people connect under impossible circumstances.
Her fiction has been recognized by the Launch Pad Prose Competition and the Andromeda Award.
She lives in the foothills of Colorado with her husband, their wildling daughter, and a small menagerie of animals. When she is not writing, she is usually outside marveling at the planet, worrying about the planet, or observing its creatures with gentle scientific curiosity.
Behind Mourning Fire
Death Remedy asks what connection can change.
Mourning Fire asks what happens after that connection succeeds.
The novel grew from questions about the aftermath of survival. What happens when the traits that kept someone alive become barriers to healing? How does a nation rebuild when war has become part of its identity? Can people accept freedom if they do not know who they are without oppression? And can two damaged people build a future together without first confronting what the past has made of them?
Mourning Fire expands the world of the Akman’s Angels Trilogy while keeping its most important conflict deeply personal: the struggle to become someone capable of living in the future you fought to create.
Read Mourning Fire
Mourning Fire is available as an ebook, in Kindle Unlimited, and in paperback.
Buy Mourning Fire on Amazon or Bookshop.org.
If you haven’t already, you’ll want to read Death Remedy, book one of the Akman’s Angels Trilogy, first. Learn more here.
And if you want to start at the very beginning, you can download Pre Mortem, the series prequel novella, for free by signing up for my newsletter.
