ASHES OF THE WEAVE

The sky tore open without a sound. One second, Kael Vane was fishing in silence. The next, reality split like rotten canvas—and something reached through to brand him. Now a black spiral burns beneath his skin. It itches when chaos is near. It hungers when monsters approach. And it is spreading. Up his arm. Across his chest. Toward his heart. Kael is a soldier who lost everything. His sword is snapped in half. His honor is ash. He wants to hide. But the mark won't let him. Every time the Unraveled come—blank-faced horrors of bone and violet light that unmake flesh with a touch—the mark screams for blood. And Kael is running out of days before it eats the last of the man he used to be. The only one who can slow the rot is Mira Thorn: a foul-mouthed hedge witch with a cracked staff and zero patience for broken men. She says the mark is a key. The first mages forged the Great Weave to lock something ancient beneath reality itself. Something that is waking up now. They call it the Hollow King. Kael and Mira must reach the Spire of Origins—the black tower where the world was first stitched together—before the mark reaches his heart. But the truth waiting at the top is worse than any monster: The Weave was never magic. It was a cage. And Kael is the only one who can pick the lock. He can restore the prison and let the old world keep bleeding. He can open the door and become the Hollow King's vessel. Or he can do what no one in three thousand years has dared: Burn the cage down. Rewrite the rules. And become something the world has never seen. But the Spiral is patient. The Unraveled are hunting. And the Warden of the Iron City wants Kael's soul for his own war. Time is a luxury. Sanity is a memory. And the only thing more dangerous than the chaos outside is the god taking root inside Kael's skin. Some powers break the world. Others rebuild it. Kael Vane is about to find out which one lives in his bones.