Fake it till you Burn

To cement its dominance over the Empire, the Order of the Residual Flame patiently sowed the legend of the "Son of Ashes" across dozens of worlds: a celestial messiah destined to rise after surviving a cowardly assassination attempt. The plan was flawless: the ideal candidate had been trained in secret for fifteen years, and the public assassination attempt was meticulously staged. That was until a slightly too zealous subcontractor used a real combat dagger instead of the rigged prop. Faced with the warm corpse of their prodigy and a crowd expecting a miracle, the panicked cardinals have only one option: kidnap the first teenager born on the right day, Edgar, a cynical and lazy laundry boy, and justify his radically different appearance with the sacred scripture: "And by the heavens, he will be forever transformed."

Thrust into the heights of the theocracy in an itchy ceremonial robe that is far too big for him, Edgar finds himself trapped in a political nest of vipers with no safety net. Between a fanatical Inquisitor who smells a fraud, a wrathful elite bodyguard who dreams of strangling him, and a space empire whose interstellar portals are beginning to fail one by one, the false messiah cannot rely on any convenient magic or divine miracles. To survive the conspiracies, betrayals, and battlefields, Edgar must exploit the dirtiest secrets, negotiate improbable truces, and use purely pragmatic wits, all while ensuring that his new divine status at least allows him to eat something other than boiled roots.