Ilmar Chronicles: Revival

The empire does not need your loyalty. It only needs your labor, your silence, and enough of your life to fuel its wars. Rhylin has given all three since the day he was born. A slave on a remote estate, his world is the length of a field and the height of a palace on a distant mountain he has spent his whole life looking at. He has a mother's letter worn soft as cloth, a sister who has always been the bravest person he knows, and the particular wisdom of someone who has learned to survive by watching everything and owning nothing. It is not much. It is everything. When that everything is taken from him in a single night of fire and blood, Rhylin walks out into a world at war — a world where kingdoms fall in an afternoon, where the ground itself has begun to rot in the wake of a magic nobody fully understands, and where something ancient and patient is stirring at the edges of existence, waiting for the right moment to finish what it started. He is not a warrior. He is not chosen. He carries no destiny anyone has thought to tell him about. What he carries instead is a grief so complete it has become the architecture of who he is — and a power he did not ask for, does not want, and cannot yet control. ILMAR is the first book in an epic fantasy series — brutal, grounded, and populated by people for whom survival is never guaranteed and goodness is never simple. It is the story of what remains when everything is taken. And what it costs to use it.