First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if, instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

The Rules:

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page.
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first.
• Finally… reveal the book!

First Lines:

“The peculiar gargoyle, who spoke mostly in broken parables, shuffled to the dim corner of the ambulatory. There, strung between iron candlesticks, a spider’s web held a fly captive.”

I am such a fan of books that include gargoyles, and this scene sounds pretty gothic already. In real life, I’d probably run screaming from the room, but in a book? I can’t get enough of it.

Do you recognize the lines?

Here’s a hint:

This is an upcoming gothic romantasy novel.

Still not sure? Here’s another hint:

It’s written by Rachel Gillig, who is an incredible writer and deserves all the hype over her books.

The First Lines Friday book is:

The Knight and the Moth.

About the Book:

• Title: The Knight and the Moth
• Author: Rachel Gillig
• Series: The Stonewater Kingdom #1
• Page Length: 400 pages
• Publication Date: May 20, 2025
• Publisher: Orbit

Synopsis:

From BookTok sensation and NYT bestselling author Rachel Gillig, comes the next big romantasy phenomenon: a gothic, mist-cloaked tale of a prophetess who is forced beyond the safety of her cloister on an impossible quest to defeat the gods with the one knight whose future is beyond her sight.

Sybil Delling has spent nine years dreaming of having no dreams at all. Like the other foundling girls who traded a decade of service for a home in the great cathedral, Sybil is a Diviner. In her dreams she receives visions from six unearthly figures known as Omens. From them, she can predict terrible things before they occur, and lords and common folk alike travel across the kingdom of Traum’s windswept moors to learn their futures by her dreams.

Just as she and her sister Diviners near the end of their service, a mysterious knight arrives at the cathedral. Rude, heretical, and devilishly handsome, the knight Rodrick has no respect for Sybil’s visions. But when Sybil’s fellow Diviners begin to vanish one by one, she has no choice but to seek his help in finding them. For the world outside the cathedral’s cloister is wrought with peril. Only the gods have the answers she is seeking, and as much as she’d rather avoid Rodrick’s dark eyes and sharp tongue, only a heretic can defeat a god.

Links: Goodreads     

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