The King's Road

The valleys are wrong and nobody is allowed to speak of it. There’s a weight that sits on every chest, a gray pressure that bends every face toward the ground until nobody looks up. The people call it life, because it’s the only life they’ve ever known. Sixteen-year-old Ashel calls it that, too. He sleeps behind a tanner's shop on a single blanket and survives by the ledger he keeps behind his eyes. It tells him who is safe, who isn't, and who tolerates him today and might not tomorrow. The woman who once cared for him is four years dead. Now he steals scraps to stay alive. But there is something behind his ribs that his ledger cannot account for. A pull toward the high ground that nobody climbs. When an old wanderer named Aldric walks down from the high places with a private smile and a lightness Ashel has never seen, and speaks the name of a King the valley has forgotten, Ashel does the one thing his ledger forbids. He follows. The road he must now walk runs through forgotten ruins and past walled cities where ancient beings hunt in packs, and Ukhrath whisper from the shadows. If Ashel turns back, the valleys keep him. If he climbs, the road will strip away every defense he has used to stay alive. And at the end of it all waits a cold summit and a weathered altar, where a question he has carried his whole life will be answered by the King. That is, if the King is still alive. For readers of C.S. Lewis, John Bunyan, and Andrew Peterson.