KATHA by Sofía Rodríguez

The stars never lie—but for the first time, Katha is starting to forget what they mean.

As a Mage of the Isle, Katha is engineered to be a detached, emotionless instrument of prophecy. With a shimmering veil of artificial stars stitched directly into her eyes—neural pathways designed to filter out human feeling—she deciphers patterns of the future, forges them into physical portents, and delivers them to foreign lands without interference. Upon returning home, she scrubs away every trace of the outside world, disinfecting her skin, burning her clothes, and pruning away her memories so her vision remains sterile and pure.

Until she delivers a rusted, chipped sword to the frozen shores of Ilvik.

Ilvik’s fierce young leader, known only as the Face, refuses to accept the omen in silence. When Katha rows back to the Isle, an inexplicable, suffocating tug pulls at her chest, leaving her stars blinking in chaotic, unreadable patterns. Worse still, when a rogue leviathan follows a trail of pheromones straight from Ilvik’s coast to the Isle's sacred harbor, Katha is forced to return to the blizzard-swept tundra to sever their connection for good.

Instead of closure, she uncovers a forbidden past. Inside the geothermal tunnels beneath Ilvik’s glaciers, the Face speaks Katha’s true name—a name no outsider has ever known.

Three sun-cycles ago, Katha broke the Isle’s most sacred law to save the Face's life during a brutal trial across the ice. Together, surviving blizzards and starvation at the edge of the world, they forged an unspoken bond that defied their separate natures. Though the Isle wiped the memories from Katha’s mind, the Face remembers everything: the warmth of Katha’s touch, the sound of her laugh, and a tragic ancient tale of two doomed lovers separated by a naked sword.

Caught between an authoritarian order that demands her sterile obedience and the woman who holds the key to her stolen humanity, Katha must confront a devastating truth: the sword she forged wasn't a warning of war. It was a plea for freedom.

Perfect for fans of This Is How You Lose the Time War, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Deep, Katha is a haunting, lyrical novella about memory, bodily autonomy, and the radical act of feeling in a world built to erase you.