Miras

Elias Crowe was the last true occultist in a dying world — that's what it felt like at least. For twenty-five years he practiced in basements and locked rooms, scraping power from crumbling grimoires while the magic around him thinned to nothing. No teachers. No peers. Only old books, guttering candles, and the stubborn conviction that somewhere, something still burned. When his final ritual tears his soul across the veil between worlds, he does not arrive as a conqueror. He wakes up in the body of a twelve-year-old orphan on the edge of the most dangerous forest on the continent. Miras is a world that has been breathing and bleeding long before he arrived. Its power runs deep; through ancient deserts and moon-lit bays and mountain peaks where dragons dwell, accumulated across centuries of worship and war and slow geological time. Kingdoms rise and fall across its surface.A theocracy brands its heretics and burns them. Spirits older than any living memory play games with mortal lives for amusement.  The road ahead of him is longer than any single life should require. The world is stranger than even he anticipated. And the people he finds along the way are not a detour. One wrong move and everything burns. So he will do all he can to not burn. Miras is a slow-burn progression fantasy that hopes to draw on the atmospheric dread of Lord of the Mysteries, the hard-won power of classic cultivation fiction, and the lived-in history of a world that has been bleeding and breathing long before the story began. Magic has a price. Power leaves scars. And the forest at the edge of everything has been patient for a very long time. It is not done waiting.