The Crown War

THE NORTH HAS NEVER FOUGHT A WAR LIKE THIS ONE.

A king is dead, and the fire that could crown another died with him. Now the great houses grind against each other over a throne no living hand can lawfully claim.

Every atrocity gets called necessary, because the alternative is always worse.

But that isn't the war that's actually coming.

South of a wall of fog no army has ever crossed, something too old to be human is beginning to stir. East across the water, an ancient Empire is watching, weighing, and waiting.

And the Faith, the church that has told the North for a thousand years exactly who deserves a crown and who deserves the stake, was little more than a rumour. What's left is smoke and old sermons. Nobody has said it aloud yet, but the truth is already spreading faster than any army: the thing that told the North who it was is gone, and for the first time in its history, the North is going to have to decide who it is without being told.

A kingdom about to fight a war it has no doctrine for, under no god's watch, with no idea what's actually closing in from either direction. The old rules are ash. The new ones haven't been written yet.

Crown War, Part One is Book Two of Aetherfall. The war after the throne fell, and the beginning of the end of everything the North thought it knew about itself.