Shadow & Storms

A prophecy shadows the midrealms: in a fallen kingdom's wake, a daughter of darkness will wield a blade in one hand and rule death with the other, and the Veil—the towering wall of mist enclosing the world—will fall.

A prophecy shadows the midrealms: in a fallen kingdom's wake, a daughter of darkness will wield a blade in one hand and rule death with the other, and the Veil—the towering wall of mist enclosing the world—will fall. For decades, these words have shaped law and fear. Women were stripped of their right to fight. An innocent girl was blamed as the prophesied threat. Kingdoms crumbled under the hidden manipulation of King Artos, an empath who breeds monsters in secret prisons and bends rulers to his will. Now his former champions—Warswords, the elite monster-hunters sworn to defend the realm—have discovered his treachery. The war for the midrealms begins with a rescue mission to the most feared prison in existence: the Scarlet Tower.

Wilder as a weapon of darkness

Wilder Hawthorne, one of the midrealms' elite Warswords, wakes in the suppressive dark of the Scarlet Tower—a prison at the edge of the Veil where magic is muted and reality warps. Drugged and manacled, he endures forced nightmare cycles: watching loved ones die, reliving his hometown burning, feeling the blows of his own trials over and over. Between horrors, the torturers show him something tender—his cabin, Thea waiting inside—then rip it away. A cellmate named Aemund, the man Wilder once helped imprison for attempting to poison King Artos, leads him to the tower's laboratory. There, alchemists inject prisoners with shadow magic, turning ordinary people into howlers—mindless cursed soldiers. The Archmage of Chains declares his intention: to remake Wilder into a general of darkness for Artos' army.

Thea's sun orchid bomb frees Wilder from the torture table

While shadow magic constricts Wilder on the laboratory table, Thea—newly forged as a Warsword after surviving the Great Rite—fights her way into the tower's depths. She arrived on the island with Talemir Starling, Wilder's estranged former mentor, a shadow-touched warrior with wings who battled wraiths overhead as diversion. Thea tears a reaper's heart from its chest barehanded, then descends spiral stairs guided by a whisper of lightning she sent to find Wilder. In the laboratory, she hurls Talemir's sun orchid sphere—a device whose golden essence disintegrates anything shadow-touched on contact. The explosion turns Wilder's enchanted chains to ash, restoring his Warsword strength. He smashes the glass case holding his swords with the Archmage's own skull, and together they carve their way toward the surface through rivers of black blood.