The Spear-Dowm

The Empire has been at war for as long as anyone can remember. Not a war that can be won or lost. A war that simply continues — swallowing land, harvests, and the young men of a thousand nameless villages who never had a choice in any of it. Few survive. Fewer return. And the ones who do are never the same men who left. Edric is fourteen years old. One boy among countless thousands, in an army that measures men the way it measures grain ,in bulk, in supply, in how much is left. The Empire has consumed whole kingdoms. Whole generations. It has never once considered what it might accidentally forge in the process.