The Last Road Home

The war was supposed to end at the frontier.

After years of holy violence in distant lands, Sir Ragenald of the Order of the Ashen Vow rides home expecting stone walls, hearth smoke, and the hard peace earned by survival. Instead he finds villages emptied without battle, chapels desecrated, fields rotting where harvest should stand, and something winged and unclean moving through the dark.

Whatever has taken root in the homeland is not plague alone, and not simple invasion. It hunts shrines, twists the sacred, drives beasts into frenzy, and presses on the minds and flesh of the living, feeding on fear, desire, grief, and doubt.

As the dead multiply and the roads collapse into nightmare, Ragenald and his battered companions must ride deeper inland toward the Border Shrine and the lands beyond, where older evils stir and every mile closer to home reveals a more terrible truth.

For the Ashen Vow, the battle abroad was only the beginning.