Fantasy Romance · Forthcoming

Ondine Roux

Lush, character-driven romantasy of marsh, marble, and dangerous tenderness — set in hidden cities where bargains are sealed by the body and old families carry fire in the blood.

Desire is not a side plot.
It is a form of magic.
01About the Author

A writer of locked doors
that open inward.

Portrait of Ondine Roux

Ondine Roux writes fantasy romance for readers who came for the spice and stayed for the politics — or came for the politics and discovered the spice was the politics. Her work lives at the seam between court intrigue and intimate consequence: marshes that hide kingdoms, contracts that bind by touch, magic that runs on appetite, and heroines whose softness was never the same thing as smallness.

She believes the bedroom is a negotiating chamber, that desire and shame and power are entangled the way roots are, and that a good love story is one in which a woman becomes inconveniently larger by the end. She writes open-door because her themes demand a body in the room. She writes magic that you have to do, not say.

The body is not an interruption of character. The body is where character becomes impossible to fake.

Her debut series, Houses of Ash and Tide, is a six-book contemporary fantasy romance set in a hidden Mediterranean port — four feuding magical Houses, an empty fifth seat, and the slow-burn collision between two heirs whose elements are not supposed to want each other.

Ondine is represented for fiction. New books and rare letters arrive in inboxes through the Letters.

02The Series

Houses of Ash and Tide

A six-book contemporary romantasy of feuding magical families on a working Mediterranean coast — old grudges, illegal trades, ritual desire, and the slow, dangerous reopening of a door that history closed.

Beneath a sunlit port city of four hundred thousand mortals, four great Houses still rule the world they hide in. They have been dynasties for two thousand years and crime families for two hundred. They run the harbor, the banks, the towers, and the fight-stages above; below, in chambers older than the city, they keep court by candle and salt water and stone. Each book pairs lovers from rival Houses and asks the same forbidden question: what is owed when fire wants water, when air bargains with earth, and when a fifth element — long thought extinct — breathes again somewhere in the dark.

House i
Kalavari
Fire

Copper, flame, and the fight-stage. Protection rackets and gambling halls above; the Old Forge below. Quick to honor, quicker to insult, the most overtly violent of the four.

House ii
Oresh
Water

Salt, fog, and the fishing fleet. Smuggling and shipping above; the Tide-Yards below. The most profitable House and the most patient. Their grudges are tidal.

House iii
Saerin
Earth

Stone, gold, and the long ledger. Banking and construction above; the Hill underworks below. Conservative, embedded in the legitimate economy, and reading every contract twice.

House iv
Vyrsi
Air

Glass, height, and overheard things. Intelligence and forgery above; the Wind-Library below. Smallest, most sophisticated, and the only House whose archive listens back.

Status Book one is in active drafting. Cover, title, and release window will be announced first to readers on the Letters list. Comp readers and ARC opportunities for later books will be drawn from the same list.
03Available Now · A Companion Novella

Steam at the Stage

Steam at the Stage by Ondine Roux — a hand at rest beside a tumbler of amber liquor on a brass bar in low light
Cover · Nell Harker

For everyone who has ever wanted what they were warned against — and did not, in the end, unwant it.

Vedarra, May 1968. Catarina Kalavari-Pal has eighteen years in the Cadre and a contract she has done before: discourage an Oresh smuggling lieutenant whose books are quietly eating her House's port revenue. She has never resonated with an opposed-element Embered. She does not, until she does — until the heat has gone through her body from the upper gallery of the Stage and rearranged what she will be willing to do.

Renzo Oresh-Vell, two stories below her in the smoke of a Wednesday fight night, knows he has been marked. He has decided to make it cost. He has not decided what to do about the Kalavari standing on the gallery whose attention has just changed the chemistry of the room.

Six weeks. One contract that cannot be completed cleanly. A thirty-year-old grief that links their families, an inherited wound that wants to refuse them, and a Mole walk neither of them planned. A standalone novella of opposed-element forbidden romance, ritual desire, and the slow recognition that some doors only open from the wrong side.

Length ~25,800 words
Heat Open-door
Setting Vedarra, 1968
Series Side-canon

18+ · Reader notes. Explicit on-page intimacy, organized-crime context, off-page parental death and a 1949 contract case referenced in the inheritance. Full content notes inside the front matter.

04The Letters

Slow letters from a closed door.

One letter a month, occasionally two. Cover reveals, release dates, deleted scenes, candle-lit research notes from the world of the four Houses, and the rare bonus chapter that lives nowhere else. No churn. No spam. Unsubscribe in one tap.

No third-party sharing. Ever.
Your name is on the list. The first letter will find you.
05Correspondence

For readers, for the trade.

Reader Mail

Letters from readers

Thoughts on the work, fan questions, ARC team inquiries, podcast and interview requests for general press.

hello@ondineroux.com
Rights & Representation

Trade enquiries

Subsidiary rights, foreign rights, audio rights, film and television, blurb requests, and editorial correspondence are handled through representation.

rights@ondineroux.com