The Shadow of the King

No one remembers when the king stopped dreaming.

Sir Sven gave the king eleven years of loyalty. He got nothing back but a death sentence aimed at a starving old man — and when he refused to carry it out, the king discarded him without a second thought.

Stripped of rank, lands, and name, Sven rides out with nothing but the armor on his back.

Armor he can no longer remove.

No sleep finds him. No food sustains him. No water touches his throat. He tells himself a blacksmith will cut him free somewhere down the road.

He's wrong.

Whatever's been done to him runs deeper than steel.

So he keeps riding, taking what work he can find, chasing some way back to the life he lost. But every village he passes tells the same story: fields stripped bare by the crown's collectors, bandits left to rule because no soldier was ever sent to stop them, people who've stopped expecting anything from their king but hunger.

And underneath all of it, something darker is stirring — older than the curse on his armor, older than the king himself, and somehow tangled up in both.

Sven only wanted to start his life over.

What he finds instead might cost him whatever's left of it.