Wrath & Athenaeum Books in Order

Wrath & Athenaeum is a trilogy that starts like urban fantasy and keeps opening outward until it feels closer to portal fantasy with epic stakes. The books move between modern-day San Francisco and Corpiliu, an alternate dimension linked to it, with Zebub as San Francisco's strange mirror city. If you like stories where the city feels haunted, political, and fully alive, this is the hook.

At the center are Erik and Lil. Erik is a former teen star in San Francisco whose life is already a mess before he learns he is Blooded, descended from the gods. Lil lives in Zebub and begins the series trying to understand the sudden deaths of her parents, while navigating a world where power is unevenly shared and the truth is dangerous. They start far apart, but the trilogy keeps pulling their stories together.

The city matters here.

San Francisco is not just a recognizable backdrop with magic sprinkled on top. Tilahun uses it as a place of memory, class tension, queer life, and loss, then folds it into Corpiliu, where strange beings, old hierarchies, and hidden histories make everything feel warped and bigger. The result is a series that can give you secret agencies, gods, monsters, and alternate-world politics without losing sight of neighborhoods, family pressure, and the feeling of walking through a city that is changing under your feet.

Across The Root, The Tree, and The Fruit, the larger problem is a consuming darkness and the war gathering around it. Each book widens the frame. What begins with personal crises and buried secrets grows into a fight over who gets to survive, who gets to tell the truth, and whether either world can be saved without becoming something unrecognizable. There are betrayals, shifting loyalties, and plenty of characters carrying damage into impossible situations.

It gets big fast.

What keeps the series readable is that it never forgets the people inside the spectacle. Erik's anger, grief, and stubbornness matter. So do Lil's search for truth and her refusal to stay quiet when the people above her want silence. The tone is dark, emotional, and sometimes messy in a very human way. Readers who want neat heroics may find it rougher than that. Readers who like fantasy with queer characters, unusual mythology, city grit, and a real sense of pressure will probably feel at home. Start with The Root and read straight through, because this trilogy is built to grow from book to book.