The Crown of Ash

A man's struggle with the beast within and love is enough to crumble the foundations of the world. Join Rovik on a quest to find his origins. 

Book Excerpt: 

The rain in the mountain pass didn't fall—it clung. It was a freezing mist that tasted of wet slate and iron, coating the world in a damp, suffocating hush that swallowed even the sound of a heartbeat. Nothing moved without permission here. Nothing lived long without earning the right to draw its next breath.

Rovik stood motionless on a jagged outcropping six hundred feet above the valley floor. To any traveler below, he would have been mistaken for a gargoyle carved into the granite—ancient, patient, and utterly still.

Most men's muscles would have seized in the alpine cold; their resolve would have turned brittle. But Rovik's blood ran at a slow, heavy simmer—a banked furnace beneath his skin that refused the frost. Heat lived in him—unnatural, watchful, and deeply aware of its own hunger.

Burn, the voice hissed beneath his ribs. The cold is an insult. It is a cage of ice designed to keep us small. Burn it away. 

Rovik's jaw tightened. He did not respond. To acknowledge the voice was to feed it, and he had spent a lifetime being taught by the Order of Shadow that the dragon within was a guest that intended to become the master.

"The target is late," Rovik said, his voice a low rumble, filed down to something blunt and clinical.

Behind him, Glimark—the Master of the Order—stepped into the periphery of his vision, a spindly figure wrapped in robes that seemed to drink the surrounding light. "The merchant is cautious," Glimark replied. "He carries what the Order requires. And what the Order requires, we provide." 

Glimark’s eyes, as dark and vacant as a starless sky, drifted to Rovik’s hands. The knuckles were white, gripping the leather hilts of his twin obsidian daggers. "The beast stirs?" 

"It is under control," Rovik said.

Liar, the voice inside him purred. We are the mountain. We are the storm. Let us out, and we will turn this stone to glass. 

"Keep it so," Glimark warned. "You are a Vaelkar, Rovik. That means you are a king in a world of peasants, but even a king can be toppled if he is loud and foolish. Be the weapon, not the dragon." 

Below, a flicker of lantern light appeared through the shifting mist. The merchant’s convoy—a fortress on wheels reinforced with iron bands—moved through the narrow pass with agonizing slowness.

"Go," Glimark whispered.

Rovik didn't hesitate. He stepped off the ledge. He didn't fall like a man; gravity seemed to surrender to him. He dropped through six hundred feet of empty air with terrifying, predatory grace—a black bolt of lightning cutting through the fog.

Yes, the dragon whispered. Falling is just another way of flying. Let the ground fear us.