The Heretic Knight

I burned heretics for the Order of Holy Light. I never asked if they were guilty. Kaelen Vex was the Order's most efficient executioner — a boy taken from nothing, forged into a weapon of faith. For fourteen years he lit pyres, silenced dissent, and believed every prayer he was told to say. Then he found the mark carved beneath a plague church altar. A symbol the Order had taught him to kill for. And he began to ask the question that would destroy him: What if the heretics were telling the truth? Now Kaelen runs. Hunted by his own brothers, carrying a wound that will not heal and a guilt that will not drown, he follows a trail of hidden maps and mad journals toward a place the Order has erased from history — Hollow Maw, where the old gods were buried and something worse was built on their bones. The Grey Plague is rising. The Order is lying. And the only man who can tear down the faith of an empire is the one who built his life on it. A dark medieval fantasy for readers who want slow-burn tragedy, atmospheric dread, and a protagonist who has already lost everything before the story begins.