The Everlasting

The legend begins beneath a yew tree, where a nameless orphan girl pulled an ancient sword from the bark and used it to slaughter the brigand prince who had taken a captive noblewoman.

The legend begins beneath a yew tree, where a nameless orphan girl pulled an ancient sword from the bark and used it to slaughter the brigand prince who had taken a captive noblewoman. That woman, Yvanne, knighted the girl and named her Una—meaning only. Over decades, Una won Yvanne's crown, conquered a continent, and earned a litany of titles: the Red Knight, the Virgin Saint, the Drawn Blade of Dominion. Her story became a nation's founding myth—honor, sacrifice, chivalry, tragedy. But behind every legend, someone is telling it. And behind this one, someone has been telling it over and over, adjusting the details each time, for a very long time.

A scarred historian holds a legendary text that shouldn't exist

Owen Mallory is a war-damaged medievalist at Cantford College, nursing a scarred throat, shaking hands, and a stalled manuscript on the Everlasting Cycle. As a fatherless boy in Queenswald, he discovered Una's legend in a children's book beneath an ancient yew and fell so completely that at twenty-three he enlisted in Dominion's war against the Hinterlands. He proved an inexplicably perfect marksman but a wretched soldier—he deserted at the final battle, and his commanding officer slit his throat. Now, years later, an impossible book arrives at his desk: The Death of Una Everlasting, bound in red heartwood, bearing a dragon-eating-its-tail device. Every historian in the country has declared this text a myth. Owen hides it from his rival Harrison and runs.

Vivian Rolfe stabs Owen's hand onto an empty book

The book vanishes from Owen's flat. A white card leads him to the capitol, where he encounters his father protesting outside and Vivian Rolfe—the former Minister of War—inside. Vivian flatters Owen, declaring him the man to translate Dominion's greatest artifact and rekindle national spirit. He opens the book, radiant with ambition—and finds every page blank. Before he can process this, Vivian drives a letter opener through the back of his hand, pinning it to the paper. His blood spreads across the empty pages. She leans close and whispers that Una needs him. The smell of pine and snow fills his lungs. The office dissolves, and Owen falls backward through nine hundred years of history.

The legend is scarred, broken, and pointing a sword at Owen Winter sunlight. Frost-heavy branches. Owen's hand pressed to the trunk of a yew tree that was cut down years ago in his own time. A blade settles against his larynx—held by a woman nothing like the golden saint of propaganda posters. Una…