by The Failed Engineer
Roth Maren was thirty-four years old and unrivaled in the business of killing. But a man who deals in death eventually finds it waiting at his own door. After finally walking away from the underworld to build a quiet, ordinary life, his past returned to violently strip away the only life he'd built for himself. He died on a blood-soaked floor, humming a lullaby to the daughter he'd just bought a life for, bleeding out with a weapon in his hand and a world away from ever seeing her again. Awakening as an infant in a strange new world of aura-powered mechanical armor and ancient magic, he is given a second chance as Valian Thorne. He retains the lethal, surgical precision of his past life, but correcting old mistakes isn't his goal; he simply wants the quiet peace he was robbed of. But the Kingdom of Vael is already a nation at war, and something older than the war is stirring beneath it: a threat that predates the kingdoms fighting over it by a thousand years. When that undercurrent threatens to tear apart the new world he is trying to build, Valian is forced to step back onto the battlefield he swore he'd never return to.
