The Fifth

In a world where power is a birthright, being born without it is a sentence. Nearly everyone possesses a Gift, from enhanced strength and sharpened senses to command over flame and other fragments of the natural world. Those born without one are treated as lesser beings, driven towards the lowest reaches of society and dismissed as people with nothing to offer.

Alexander is one of them, but he has spent his entire life refusing to accept what that is supposed to mean. Giftless from birth, frighteningly intelligent and possessed of an ambition that rarely allows him to rest, he has built everything others were fortunate enough to inherit. He learned to fight men empowered beyond him, studied wars fought centuries before his birth and earned a place within the King’s Pavilion of Alesaria, where seasoned commanders have reluctantly learned that the nineteen-year-old standing beside their maps often understands their wars better than they do.

For Alexander, even that is not enough. He does not dream of wealth, comfort or a quiet life beneath the protection of those born stronger than him. He wants kleos, the kind of glory that outlives the man who earned it. He wants his name spoken centuries after his death, alongside the kings, warriors and conquerors whose lives filled the books of his childhood. When war finally offers him the chance to leave those books behind, however, his first campaign ends not in glory but catastrophe. Alexander is captured, dragged across the border and sold into slavery, where the brilliant adviser to a king becomes nothing more than another gladiator expected to bleed for the entertainment of strangers.

Survival forces Alexander into the life he had always believed he wanted. He fights, loses, learns and begins to discover the difference between understanding violence from a map and living through it with a blade in his hand. Yet beyond the wars of kings and the brutality of the arena linger stories older than the kingdoms themselves. For millennia, legends have spoken of the Unrivalled Four, beings whose powers stand so far beyond ordinary Gifts that history remembers them more as gods than people: an immortal king who once ruled the world before disappearing, an ancient Sylph with absolute dominion over the elements, a being capable of stealing Gifts and making them its own and a healer capable of restoring what should never be restored.

Alexander has never had a Gift. He has never needed one to believe he was destined for something greater than the life the world assigned him. But when he begins seeing moments that have not yet happened, his pursuit of glory becomes something far greater than the rise of a Giftless man. For the first time in recorded history, a power has appeared that even the legends cannot explain, and the world that once considered Alexander beneath it may soon have to decide what to call him.

For thousands of years, there have been four Unrivalled.

Alexander intends to make it five.