by SirRocket
In the town of Harrow, they mine the bones of a dead god. They pay for the privilege in people. Every year the lord's soldiers come with a list. Every year the town kneels, the names are read, and twenty people walk east in chains. Nobody asks where they go. The letters home say eastern diggings. The letters say be patient. This year, the last name on the list is Rovan Vale's little brother. Rovan is a twenty-three-year-old miner with a pit-fighter's knuckles and a bad habit of not knowing when to stay down. When the lord's champion beats him bloody in front of the whole town and tells him to yield, he says no. He doesn't mean anything by it. He just can't do it. In this world, power is made from surrender. When one will truly accepts that another has beaten it, something passes between them: Dominion. It is real, it can be felt, and it has held every throne, charter and god in place for a thousand years. Lords are built from the yields of the people beneath them. Champions are built from the yields of the men they break. And the things that sleep under the mountains grow fat on the biggest yield of all. Rovan can be beaten. He can be broken, bound, dragged to his knees and made to bow his head to the dirt. What he can't do is make that last small move inside himself, from you beat me to so you own me. Nobody has ever met a man like that. The whole world is about to find out what he's worth. With a stolen hammer, a smith with a hand of god-bone, a seven-foot Vaarn who eats the hearts of the brave, and a teenage storyteller who can't stop writing him into legend, Rovan sets off after the column. The trail runs through quarries, broken bridges and burning roads to a fortress built in a skull's eye socket, and to the door in the mountain where the columns go in and never come out. And waiting for him at every step is Serath Veyr, the lord's daughter and the best sword in the territory. She believes the strong have the right to rule the weak, and she has never yielded to anyone who didn't earn it. She wants to beat him fairly, in front of everyone. And then she wants to see what he does.
