by myersfyi
A hundred years ago, every king on Earth vanished in a single night. Every monarch. Every emperor. Every tribal chief. Every ceremonial figurehead. Gone in the same instant, leaving thrones that were still warm. The world adapted. Republics expanded. Corporations crowned themselves. The thrones were forgotten by polite history and buried in basements and battlefields and abandoned rooms. But the thrones did not forget. They wait. Sometimes, they pull. Junha is twenty-two and works the night shift in a hospital morgue. He has not properly grieved the brother who walked out of the family apartment three years ago and never came back. There was a funeral with no body. A closed casket weighed down with rice bags. There has been, since then, a quiet rage Junha has carried under his ribs and shown to no one. When a stone throne appears between two autopsy tables at three in the morning, Junha does the worst possible thing. He sits. What he inherits is a Regalia. A fragment of authority from a Vanished king whose name nobody in the shadow government dares speak. His domain is called the Quiet Court. His power is over what has died. His debt is sleep. He will never have it again. By morning, two factions are hunting him. The Court of Thirteen, a shadow government of the strongest Throne-Bearers in Korea, wants him recruited or dead. They have a third option, called the geas, that is worse than the second one. The man who killed his brother, who sits on neither faction and answers to nobody, wants him broken. He has spent forty-three years patiently destroying everyone interesting who has crossed his path. He has been bored for a decade. He has just decided Junha is interesting. Junha has, on his side, one woman. Im Yurei has been a Court field agent for four years. She has been hiding the actual size of her Regalia from her superiors since the day she joined. She has been waiting four years for someone whose throne calls them what hers called her. The night she meets Junha, she stops waiting. She has a plan. The plan starts with hunting Hegemons. The Hollow Throne: The Quiet Court is a dark Korean urban fantasy about the only Throne-Bearer in a century who inherited the throne and does not yet know it. It is about a hidden civil war among the Court of Thirteen. It is about a sadistic businessman who is articulate, intelligent, and absolutely without conscience, and what happens when he experiences surprise for the first time in ten years. It is about a quiet person handed, at last, a name to put his rage against. The fight starts on day two. For readers of Jujutsu Kaisen, Solo Leveling, Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, and The Beginning After the End.
