These Shattered Spires by Cassidy Ellis Salter

Title: These Shattered Spires

Author: Cassidy Ellis Salter

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Australia

Published: 31^st March 2026

Format: Paperback

Pages: 368

Price: $19.99

Synopsis: In a rotten and bloody world, four magical rivals are forced to work together to avoid certain death in a deadly competition. Gothic, visceral and utterly compelling, These Shattered Spires is the first book in the Wyrdos trilogy.

Beneath a tooth-filled sky, the world rots.

At the heart of the decaying world is Fourspires Castle, home to arcanists from across the four magical disciplines: bone, blood, botany and stone.

When the king is assassinated, chaos erupts. To seize the crown, arcanists and their human familiars are dragged into the Slaughter – a deadly competition, where survival means killing and death is the only escape.

Amidst the bloodshed, four rival familiars must work together … Taro, a bone witch still obsessed with her ex. Nixie, a botanical familiar with a ghost living in her bedroom. Elliot, a cursed and vengeful blood familiar and Alix, banished from the stone arcania tower and shrouded in secrets.

Together, the four Wyrdos are not just fighting to survive, but to lift the curse upon their world. There must be more to the sky than a dome of teeth and spittle; there must be something beyond the decay of Fourspires …

~*~

These Shattered Spires is the first book in the Wyrdos Trilogy by non-binary author, Cassidy Ellis Salter. So come into the world of Fourspires Castle, where four magical disciplines live: bone, blood, botany and stone. Redspire is blood, Greenspire is Botany, Blackspire is bone and Greyspire is stone. When the king is assassinated, it kicks off a countdown to the Slaughter, where the arcanists and their human familiars are drawn into a fight to the death to see who gains the crown. The arcanists are willing to sacrifice anyone for what they want, including their familiars.

Enter Alix, the stone arcanist. Elliot, the blood arcanist. Nixeen, the botanic arcanist. And Tarenteeno, the bone arcanist. They’re rivals, all working to kill each other and get to the pinnacle of the tower. All working against each other. Alix has been banished from the stone tower, and Taro and Nixie have a relationship. And they all hate each other. They’re all working hard against each other.

It’s a decaying world where the grotesque is revelled in. Were death, blood and gore is seen as normal. Where a countdown to the Slaughter is carved into the backs of the familiars. They’re sacrificial lambs, and only the one who gets to the top wins. Except these four have worked out what is really going on, and set about working against the tide. They’re reluctantly working together, and as a result, the novel felt as though it was driven more by the characters and their relationships than the plot. It’s told through four point of view chapters for each familiar, and slowly, the world unravels around them.

The majority of the book is all about the lead up to the Slaughter, so each chapter has a countdown as part of the chapter heading. It gives it a sense of urgency, but at the same time, it felt like time was moving slowly, and there were ebbs and flows. Some sections had me engaged and intrigued, whilst others were a bit slow and felt like they needed some oomph to move them along and get into what I thought should have been quite a frenetic timeline.

Theres ghosts and strange nuns that seem to be soulless, called the Unholy Mothers, and a rotting world. Everything is grotesque, a sense of fantastical horror that wraps itself around the characters. Given how long it took to get somewhere in this novel, I am hoping that things pick up in books two and three, and that there is a sense that the familiars are going to find a way to repair their world after the destruction they have faced. What’s to come next will hopefully give something exciting to this book and its unapologetically queer characters.

It is a fight for survival, and it doesn’t feel like it is over yet.