The Curse of Arcadia

In a village where every child is born with hair the color of fire or the sea, Kaelid was born with neither — black as a crow's wing, and treated like a bad omen for it his entire life. On his sixteenth birthday, he walks away from his family's bakery and everything safe about it to become a wanderer: one of the few who hunt the monsters bleeding out of the mountains at the edge of the world, and climb the long, brutal ladder of strength that separates the ordinary from the legendary.

But power in Arcadia always costs something. Every soul that reaches Enlightenment is marked — engraved with a curse drawn from one of the old sins or virtues, a burden as real and permanent as the strength it comes bundled with. Kaelid will have to learn to carry his own, alongside a found family of allies just as flawed and just as driven as he is, while the world above them keeps escalating past anything any of them are ready for.

Some people are born cursed. Kaelid's just getting started.