The Unspoken Name, the debut novel from A.K. Larkwood, is a satisfying epic fantasy with several interesting wrinkles. Csorwe is an orc priestess who spends her life preparing to be sacrificed to a god known as the "Unspoken One." She decides to abandon her fate to serve a mysterious wizard who arrives and offers her another path. Much of Csorwe's story is about the weight of obligation and debts that can never be paid--the wizard Belthandros Sethennai helps convince her to abandon one form of servitude only to enter another.
The novel proceeds in a somewhat episodic fashion. After helping Sethennai secure the city from which he was exiled, Csorwe becomes his agent in a hunt for the Reliquary, a powerful item and a fairly standard fantasy McGuffin. The Unspoken Name sets itself apart, however, with its worldbuilding: Csorwe navigates a kind of fantasy multiverse in her travels, one filled with airships, giant snakes, gods and many dead worlds. There is a Lovecraftian unknowability to Larkwood's gods that adds to the gothic, doomy mood.
Against this backdrop, Csorwe's quest begins to be derailed by her increasing affection for a powerful magic user, Shuthmili, an Adept in a strict order that has dark designs on her future. As the relationship develops between the two, Larkwood takes as her theme the painful process of unlearning orthodoxy. Both Csorwe and Shuthmili were "raised for death"--the most challenging part of their journey is learning how to choose a more hopeful fate. --Hank Stephenson, manuscript reader, the Sun magazine