Bitter Ashes Books in Order

Bitter Ashes centers on Madeline, a young woman who has spent years treating her own touch like a loaded weapon. People die around her too easily, so isolation feels safer than closeness. That breaks the night she is taken into the hidden world of the Vaettir, beings tied to old magic, old gods, and a vicious struggle for power.

At first the series works like dark portal fantasy with a romantic edge. Madeline is dropped into a place where corpses reanimate, loyalties shift fast, and almost no one tells the full truth. Sophie, a familiar face from her past, becomes part of the shock. So does Alaric, a dangerous, magnetic shifter who makes distrust much harder than it should be.

That mix is the engine.

Across the books, the story widens from one frightened woman trying to understand her curse into a hunt for a charm powerful enough to reshape the world. The stakes move from personal survival to questions of fate, dominion, and whether the gods behind the curtain are any better than the monsters in the room. Roethle keeps the scale high, but she never loses Madeline's uncertainty, guilt, and stubborn will to keep moving.

The tone is dark fantasy romance, but it is not only romance. There is myth, betrayal, blood, and a steady feeling that every alliance comes with a hidden cost. Readers who like occult atmosphere, wounded heroines, morally messy love interests, and stories where the supernatural world feels old and dangerous will probably feel at home here.

It is also useful to know that Bitter Ashes sits close to Roethle's later Will of Yggdrasil books. The core setup overlaps, but Bitter Ashes has the feel of the earlier, sharper serial version of this corner of her mythology. If you want the darker, quicker-cut route into Madeline's story, this is the one.