Before the Elder Dark

The Dominion built its empire on a simple trick: keep the poor angry at each other, and they will never look up. Alexei Kael looked up. Three years ago, he founded the Unbound — a scrappy underground movement built on a radical idea the Dominion would rather bury than fight: the people it exploits have more in common with each other than with the ones profiting from their suffering. For a while, it almost worked. Then a revolutionary from beyond the wall arrives with an offer that could change everything: unite the resistance, strike at the puppet king, and turn two broken movements into one force the empire has never had to face. It is the kind of alliance Alexei has spent years hoping for. It is also the kind of alliance that can get people killed. Because the Dominion does not stay still. The spirits are restless. Old powers stir beneath the world. And Alexei — who can hear whispers in the flux where nobody else hears anything at all — is beginning to realize that the war he thought he was fighting may only be the first layer of something far older, stranger, and far more dangerous. In a world ruled by propaganda, extraction, and silence, one man is trying to hold together a revolution, a fragile alliance, and the last pieces of his faith before the dark comes through the cracks.