Crownless

Corvain Ashvael built an empire out of a kingdom and ash out of everything that stood in his way. When the knife finally came, it came from a man he'd knighted himself — and Corvain died the way he'd ruled: certain he'd been right all along. He was wrong. The god who meets him on the other side isn't interested in punishing him. She's interested in fixing him, which turns out to be worse. Corvain wakes up thirty years in the past, in the body of a blacksmith's son, in the first village his armies ever burned. He remembers every year of the empire he built and every atrocity it cost him — and he's been given exactly one chance to make sure none of it happens again. Not by seizing the throne and ruling better. By making absolutely certain he never sits on it at all, and that nothing wearing his old habits does either. That's the catch. History doesn't forget what it wants. Something in Dravenhal keeps pulling toward the same throne, the same cruelty, the same ending, no matter who's standing closest to the crown. Corvain has thirty years to out-think the pattern that made him — using the very knowledge that damned him the first time — and if he fails, he doesn't go to hell. He goes back to year one. And starts again. Between now and the day he used to die, he'll have to out-maneuver his own younger self's worst instincts, protect a village he once put to the torch, navigate a court full of people he remembers betraying, and figure out how much of the man he was still lives in the boy he's become — all while a magic older than the crown starts to notice that something about him doesn't add up. Thirty years to unmake a tyrant. One of them is him.