Aura Wielders: Citadel — by B. Dalton

The Story

Something answers.

Eli Walsh never asked to be saved. At eighteen, he's weeks from a two-year church mission he doesn't believe in, trapped between a faith he's been faking and a mother whose heart he can't bear to break.

His best friend Mary wasn't going to let him go quietly. Goth, furious, and desperate enough to try anything, she drags him to an ancient mound and calls to powers that should have stayed forgotten.

Now Eli is somewhere else entirely.

A world where magic flows through the elements. Where armies clash over territory he doesn't understand. Where a girl with Mary's face answers to a different name—and where his memories of home are dissolving like smoke.

He's not sure that's a bad thing.

For readers of The Name of the Wind, The Poppy War, and A Deadly Education

The World of Terra

The Thirteen Banners

Every path of aura wielding is represented by a banner that hangs at the Citadel Academy's entrance. Magic flows through will, focus, and expression—and the path you walk defines who you become.

The Four Fundamentals

Evolved Paths

Rare & Lost Paths

Forbidden & Legendary

Aura Resonance — The Forgotten Path

Buried by the Citadel centuries ago, Aura Resonance is the ability to perceive, harmonize with, and amplify the aura of others. It is the foundation of the legendary Harmony Cadres—elite teams whose auras were woven into a single, unified thread.

The Citadel suppressed this path because it required something the institution couldn't manufacture or control: genuine trust and emotional bonds.

Surge Amplify an allied wielder's power beyond their natural limits

Echo Temporarily borrow and channel another wielder's element (requires a personal connection)

Harmony Weave a cadre's auras together—shared awareness, coordinated response, unique emergent gifts

Dispel Read the architecture of an enemy's binding and pull it apart at its structural seams

"Bonds that fail can cause lasting psychological damage to both parties. Bonds that succeed can create dependency. The emotional nature of bonding means relationships outside of combat inevitably affect combat effectiveness." — The Arcanum

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Powers of Terra

Factions & Forces

The Citadel

The dominant imperial power. The Citadel controls aura wielding through its Academy, training wielders as weapons of state. It conquered the outer territories generations ago and maintains control through military force, taxation, and conscription of gifted children.

The Conquered Territories

Farming villages, mining settlements, and hidden valleys that fell to Citadel expansion. Their own traditions of communal aura use were suppressed. Many veterans carry deep trauma from the conquest wars.

Sanctuary

Neutral holy ground, older than the Citadel itself. Sanctuary takes in refugees, the sick, and the persecuted. It preserves ancient knowledge about aura—and possibly other worlds.

The Veiled Crescent

A secret society that opposes the Citadel from the shadows. They believe the Citadel's rise began with a broken promise. Members are "marked" through initiatory experiences—the mysterious "three deaths."

The Waybound Cadre

Meet the Characters

Eli (Elijah Wayfinder)

Aura Resonance · The Forgotten Path

"I spent my whole life feeling like I was built wrong. Turns out I'm exactly the right shape for something they buried."

Eighteen, anxious, and uncomfortably perceptive. Eli notices everything about the people around him—the architecture of their emotions, the load-bearing threads in their defenses—and understands almost none of it. He can't throw fire. Can't shape water. Can't move stone. But he can make everyone around him more—and that terrifies the people in charge.

His organizational instincts come from another life. He approaches magic the way an engineer approaches a bridge: structurally.

Lyra

Tide's Grace · Evolving toward Frost's Veil

"I don't want to be what others think I should be anymore. I want to see where this takes us."

Brilliant, meticulous, and quietly fierce. She grew up being the perfect daughter and arrived at the Academy as one of the strongest water wielders in her cohort. She's the one who discovered the buried texts on Aura Resonance—and translated the Arcanum that gave the Waybound their path.

Her mother gave her an ancient book called Chronicles of the Aurum Paths as a child. It was the start of everything.

Gregor

Terra's Might · Earth Golem Summoner

"Wings don't get stolen. They break."

Built like a wall and fights like an avalanche. Gruff, guarded, and holding his grief so deep that his aura literally won't let anyone in. Only Eli found a way through—not by force, but by sitting with the grief until the wall cracked on its own. When he summons his earth golem, it takes the shape of his sister.

Gregor was apprenticed to a smith before being recruited. He still thinks in terms of metal and forge-work.

Tia

Zephyr's Breath · Wind

"Sometimes together means I hold the line while you run. That's my role."

Sharp-tongued, fiercely practical, and relentlessly disciplined. Tia is the heart of the Waybound cadre even though she'd deny it with her last breath. She reads people the way generals read battlefields and builds her strategies around what each person needs to hear. She gives everything. Including, when it matters most, herself.

She can pick locks. "Aureli Port teaches you that, whether you want the lesson or not."

Jase (Jasean)

Flame's Embrace · Fire

"Nobody picks the Bard. But the Bard is the one who decides whether the party walks out alive."

The fire everyone wants to sit beside—warm, bright, easy. He was the first person to believe in Eli's power, sharing his own flame in a moment of generosity that changed everything. Beneath the grin, Jase carries the weight of watching his closest friend become someone he can't fully reach.

He's a natural archer. Draw, aim, release—same instinct as fire.

Mira

Ethereal's Touch · Spirit

"I told Eli I'd follow him. He didn't believe me."

Stubborn the way roots are stubborn—quiet, persistent, impossible to remove once she's decided to hold on. She teaches herself to wield alone, on a haunted mound, guided by strange lights. Then she travels across the world to find Eli. She may be the second Ethereal wielder to appear in a generation.

She can sing. It's one of the few things that makes her feel like her mother is still with her.

From the Pages

Read a Few Lines

Dark · Intimate · Devastating

Eli was four—almost five, Mama said—and he knew. First came the quiet. Not the good quiet like when Mama read to them or when everyone was sleeping, but the bad quiet.

The one where nobody moved and nobody breathed loud, and even the house seemed to hold still.

The opening lines. This book doesn't ease you in.

Quiet · Relatable · Painfully Real

Funny thing about libraries: no one ever questions whether you're where you're supposed to be. A kid in a hallway gets asked for a hall pass. A kid in a parking lot gets asked where he's going. A kid in a library with a book in his hand?

Good kid.

Every quiet kid who ever hid in a library knows this scene.

Romantic · Atmospheric · Electric

Before he could stop himself, the words came:

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."

Silence dropped harder than the dark.

"Who said that?" the girl asked.

He quoted Poe in a pitch-black closet to a girl he'd never met. She recognized it.

Warm · Achingly Perceptive

"A lone book on a table sticks out. It's easy to see something is amiss. But a book out of place on the shelf… well, it might take months or even years to spot that something isn't right."

She looked back at him then.

"Eli, you're like a misshelved book sometimes. Even your own mother has trouble spotting when something's wrong."

His mother is a librarian. She knows how to find what's out of place.

Nerdy · Prophetic · Character-Defining

"Nobody picks the Bard. But the Bard is the one who decides whether the party walks out alive. Inspiration, buffs, reading the room, knowing exactly when to boost the right person."

He pointed at Eli.

"That's you. You notice things other people don't. You just don't know what to do with it yet."

In another life, it was a D&D reference. In this one, it became prophecy.

Epic · Magical · Goosebumps

"Harmonia," he breathed.

The word left him and something clicked.

Not a surge. Not an explosion.

Alignment.

The threads didn't just connect. They braided. Four strands became one chord.

They weren't merged. They were synchronized. Like musicians finding the same tempo.

Enter the Reading Room

⚠ Contains spoilers

Behind the Book

The Journey to Citadel

The Idea

A Question That Wouldn't Leave

What if you were about to leave on a two-year church mission you didn't believe in—and someone ripped you out of that life entirely? Not rescued you. Just... moved you. To a world where the question wasn't about God or faith. It was about elemental magic, military conquest, and whether the version of you that exists here is more real than the one back home.

Novel November

The Walk-In Closet Sessions

A Mac Mini on a shelf. Noise-canceling headphones drowning out the house. Dreampop on repeat until the words stopped fighting. What started as a Novel November challenge became something much bigger—a world that kept expanding, characters who wouldn't shut up, a magic system that demanded its own internal logic.

The Rewrites

Several Drafts, One Existential Crisis

The first draft was raw. The second was structured. The third found its voice. Somewhere between the Florida chapters and the Citadel chapters, the book became about more than magic—it became about the terrifying, beautiful act of letting someone see you.

The Cover

Two Boys, One Spire, and a World Between Them

The cover came to life through a brilliant artist who captured something the words could only suggest: Eli in his white shirt and glasses, back to back with the version of himself he's becoming. The Citadel spire rising between them. Two worlds. One person. A choice that's already been made.

Now

The Path Forward

The manuscript is in its final stages. The world of Terra is ready. The Waybound are assembled. All that's left is to find the readers who've been waiting for this story without knowing it. This is where you come in.

About the Author

B. Dalton

Yes, like the bookstore. He's choosing to see that as ironic rather than prophetic.

B. Dalton lives in Somewhere, Florida, where he spends an unreasonable amount of time walking through swamps, shooting expired film on old cameras, and listening to dreampop alone in the garage like it's a religious experience.

He's always been obsessed with telling stories. That obsession led him to film school, where he imagined he'd be the guy turning screenplays into the kind of movies people argue about online at 2 AM. Nobody offered to make those movies. Not even the bad ones.

So he did what any reasonable person would do: set up a Mac Mini in the walk-in closet, signed up for Novel November, and started writing a book. Several drafts, one existential crisis, and a lot of swamp walks later, Aura Wielders: Citadel is the result.

It's a portal fantasy about faith, doubt, and what happens when you wake up in a world that doesn't care who you were supposed to be. If that sounds like your kind of story, he'd love for you to read it.

When he's not writing, he's probably lost in a wetland somewhere, pretending the mosquitoes are atmospheric.