Captain Lucian Rellon is no hero of prophecy. He is a foundling, pulled from the gutter and raised on steel in the shadow of a king who taught him that blood is just the mud a man starts in. He trusts his sword, his shield-arm Bella, and precious little else.

When he is charged with escorting a foreign princess across hostile lands to her arranged marriage, he expects a hard road, bad weather, a duty paid and forgotten.

What he doesn't expect is to want the one thing he can never keep.

Before he can bury it, a darkness, long chained beneath stone and ward and the silence of dead gods awakens. And it knows Lucian’s name.

With time running out and loyalties tested, Lucian must retrieve a book older than the mortal world, unaware that the greatest threat to everything he holds dear may lie within the truth of his own existence.