The Cerythian Chronicles
A City Beneath
Book One
A world sealed beneath the earth. A people who still remember the sun. A secret five hundred years in the dark.
A world sealed beneath the earth. A people who still remember the sun. A secret five hundred years in the dark.
When Declan Riley follows an old family journal into the ground, he finds a city that was never meant to be found.
Cerythia has been sealed beneath the earth for five hundred years — a whole world of stone and lantern-light, of glowing loran trees and a colosseum called the Lismo, watched over by a black spire with a red heart. Its people have not forgotten the sun. They ache for it. And they have spent five centuries trying to find their way back to it.
Declan and his best friend Patrick came looking for a legend. What they find is a city on the edge of something — and a reason it was buried in the first place. Getting down was the easy part. Getting home is another story entirely.
A grounded, fast-moving portal fantasy for readers who like their wonder with real stakes — and a cliffhanger that earns the wait for Book Two.
From the forest and its towering loran trees, down past the Atheron spire and the arena, to the poorest streets of Drevos near the Entrance — every corner of Cerythia is a real place on a real map.
A short in-world field guide to the city beneath — the loran trees, the food at the Lismo kiosks, and the recipe for lumora, so you can taste the world before you read it. Free when you join the list.
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Declan finds the city that was never meant to be found — and the reason it was buried.
The name Riley means something in Cerythia. Declan is about to learn exactly what.
Everything the first two books have been building toward, and the way back to the sun.
Jared was born and raised in Houston, played basketball his whole life, and spent two years on a Spanish-language mission in San Francisco that first got him writing. He lives on a six-acre hobby farm outside Reno with his wife Christine and their four children, along with cows, horses, pigs, goats, chickens, dogs, and cats.
He wrote The Cerythian Chronicles for his own kids first — a world they could disappear into, and come back from wanting to talk about it.
"The numbers pay the bills. The writing is where the rest of me lives."