• A Monk of the Lifemark cover with a pentagon with connected points against a marble background
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Buchman Bookworks, Inc.

A Monk of the Lifemark

A Monk of the Lifemark

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Some questions, once asked, cannot be unasked.

Every soul in the Five Kingdoms chooses a Lifemark at majority. Most choose a craft, a calling, a trade they were born to love. Velaya chooses something far more dangerous.

Vibrating with the compulsion that strikes every young adult on the day they come of age, Velaya arrives at the Lifemark Athenaeum. She is armed with a crumpled scroll, her lover’s quiet faith, and her mentor’s hidden hope—and her usual barrelful of questions.

Inside, among the hundreds of callings, she finds exactly what she is: a seeker, born to ask why. But she has been warned to doubt the obvious choice.

And then she finds something else entirely.

A Monk of the Lifemark is a story about the cost of asking the right question — and the rare few brave enough to pay it.

Read an Excerpt

“Did you sleep last night, Velaya?” Dad slid a breakfast plate onto the table the same moment I slid into my chair. All my favorites: fried strips of lean kavik, fresh bread, and kanya-bird eggs. All covered with honey syrup.
“How could I? My whole body is vibrating worse than if I’d been spinning in a circle twenty times one way then twenty the other. Dizzy, nauseous—”
“—and so excited that you can’t seem to breathe.” Dad smiled as he sat with his own plate. “I remember the feeling like it was yesterday. So, your majority has finally come.”
I wanted to protest. Or perhaps file a complaint with whatever god altered us after the Goddess Aramala had first made us in her own image. But the compulsion to act, which had seemed at arm’s length only last night, now pulled at me harder than a full team of burden beasts.
“How did it know? How did you choose? How did you know? I mean, what if I make the wrong choice? Or not the best for the family? Why—”
“Whoa, Velaya. Just whoa.”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek. I always had twenty questions to everyone else’s two. Dad said that I could bury a conversation faster than most people could order a brew at the pub, which only required raising a finger.
“Has she melted down yet?” Mother’s kiss atop my head made me feel like a child. But today was the day I’d reached my majority. And I could feel the tension from my forehead to my heels.
“I think that would be a yes,” I answered before Dad could do it for me.
His smile had some pity mixed into it, but it was mostly his amused face.
Mother sat with a morning cup of hot chama, and Dad pushed his plate in front of her before going to prepare another.
“Any advice?” I’d asked the question a thousand times throughout this entire twenty-two-day cycle of the moonswell. This time, the words caught in my throat and I barely managed to breathe them out.
“Yes,” Mother nodded at my plate. “Eat.”
“Mo-ther!” Now I felt like a six-year-old. If I kept this up, I’d be back in swaddling clothes and nappies by the end of the meal.

Publication Details

Initial Publication: 1 August 2026
Print pages: 68

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