Flesh and Fire

About the Flesh and Fire series

Flesh and Fire is Jennifer L. Armentrout's prequel saga to Blood and Ash, set centuries before Poppy's story in the age when Primals and gods still walked among mortals. Seraphena Mierel has been raised in secret for a single purpose: promised at birth as Consort to the Primal of Death, she is trained not to love him but to destroy him — her kingdom's desperate gambit to break a generations-old deal that is slowly killing their land. But Nyktos, the Primal she meets, is nothing like the monster she was prepared for, and the closer Sera gets to her target, the more the plan — and her heart — unravels.

Where Blood and Ash peels back a falsified history from the outside, Flesh and Fire shows that history being made: the origins of the gods, the shadowlands, and the powers that later generations will misremember as myth. Armentrout threads the two series together with escalating precision, so revelations here detonate storylines hundreds of years downstream.

Expect the author's trademarks — slow-burning, explicit romance, a heroine trained to kill, and mythology that rewards attention. The series is complete at four books, making it a satisfying self-contained arc for new readers and essential background for anyone following Blood and Ash to its finale.

How to read this series

Read in publication order: A Shadow in the Ember, A Light in the Flame, A Fire in the Flesh, and the concluding Born of Blood and Ash. There are no novellas to slot in. The bigger question is where the series fits against Blood and Ash: it is a prequel, so it can technically be read first, but most readers get more from it after at least the first four Blood and Ash books, when its reveals recontextualize what they think they know. Either way, finish Flesh and Fire before reading The Primal of Blood and Bone, where the two series' storylines converge. The series is complete at four books.