"The Frost Covenant" picks up six months after "The Obsidian Mirror", with archaeologist Lyra Holt and her husband structural engineer Rowan Ashfall enjoying a late-summer holiday on Santorini. The peace is short-lived. A cryptic call from colleague Marcus Webb draws them back to London, where he presents alarming data: weather anomalies and clusters of 'misfortune' — accidents, financial losses, sudden illnesses — have been following Dame Helena Ashworth, the collector to whom they entrusted the Obsidian Mirror. The evidence is irrefutable. Helena has been using the mirror during astronomical alignments, targeting people she deems corrupt or unworthy, convinced she is the instrument of the Aztec god Itztlacoliuhqui's cosmic justice.
Lyra, Rowan, Marcus, and Lyra's sister Elara travel to Helena's Georgian country estate, Ashworth Manor in Kent, to confront her. The first visit ends in a terrifying confrontation: Helena, increasingly possessed by the mirror's influence, floods the library with supernatural cold, the mirrors surface blazing with blue-white light. They retreat, shaken, with four days until the autumn equinox when Helena plans her most powerful activation yet, targeting dozens of corrupt public figures simultaneously. Lyra, cross-referencing temple inscriptions she'd previously overlooked, makes a devastating discovery: the Obsidian Mirror is one of five. The Aztec priests divided Itztlacoliuhqui's power among five artefacts to prevent his resurrection. Bring all five together at the Frozen Throne, and the god walks again — bringing eternal winter.
The team plans a heist, acquiring lock-picking tools, a wireless signal jammer, climbing gear, and a nondescript rental car. Helena, briefly lucid, invites them back for dinner, suggesting a compromise. The dinner is tense and ambiguous — gracious host or elaborate trap? When they finally reach the library, Helena is deep in possession, the room frozen, the mirror blazing. Through urgent, patient argument — appealing not to Helena's intellect but to her vanity as a scholar and archaeologist — Lyra breaks through. Helena, horrified by what she has almost done, voluntarily steps back from the mirror. She helps them seal it in a lead-lined case and hands it over. The autumn equinox passes quietly. The mirror is transported to the mechanisms secure facility in Turkey for safe storage.
In the epilogue, an ominous new threat emerges. A Spanish colonial missionary's journal places the four remaining mirrors in the Yucatán Peninsula, Oaxaca, under what is now Mexico City, and possibly Guatemala. And a new antagonist, the wealthy and ruthless industrialist Santiago Ruiz, has already located the same references and is planning his own expeditions to collect them. Not from nobility, but for power. He sees the inscription about the Frozen Throne not as a warning, but as instructions. The book closes with Lyra and Rowan booking flights to Mexico, racing the clock and a dangerous new rival.
Santorini, September. The holiday was going so well.
Then Marcus Webb called.
The Obsidian Mirror — the Aztec artefact that Lyra Holt and Rowan Ashfall risked their lives to retrieve from a Peruvian jungle — is not sitting quietly in a collector's vault. Dame Helena Ashworth has been using it. Channelling the power of Itztlacoliuhqui, god of frost and misfortune, she's been delivering supernatural judgement to the corrupt, the proud, and the powerful — convinced she's restoring cosmic balance.
She isn't. She's breaking five-hundred-year-old seals. And the autumn equinox is six days away.
Lyra, Rowan, and their allies race to Kent with a lead-lined case, a borrowed signal jammer, and a plan that involves considerably more breaking and entering than any of them are comfortable with. But what they find at Ashworth Manor is worse than a determined collector — it's a woman who's no longer entirely herself, standing in a freezing library, the mirror blazing with blue-white light, utterly convinced she's been chosen.
And beneath it all, a discovery that changes everything.
The Obsidian Mirror is one of five. The Aztec priests divided the frozen god's power between five artefacts, each hidden in a different corner of Central America. If all five are brought together, Itztlacoliuhqui walks again. Eternal winter. No appeal. No second chances.
Lyra and Rowan secured the first one. Now someone else is already looking for the rest.
The race to the Frozen Throne has begun. And not everyone running it wants to stop it.
"The Frost Covenant" is the second adventure in the Lyra & Rowan Obsidian Mirror Trilogy— a thriller of ancient power, modern obsession, and two people who refuse to let dangerous things stay lost.
57 Pages
19,362 words
Illustrated
*Adult content. Recommended for readers 18+.*
