The Shadow and The Flame

At ten years old, Alain Galaide left home to fight a war that had already killed better soldiers than him. At fifteen, he came back as the Black Knight of the North — a national hero, and a stranger to everyone who thought they knew him. What he actually did to end a five-year war is the one thing he will never tell anyone, and the Empire has stopped asking.

His father's solution to a weapon that's outlived its war is to enroll him at the Imperial Academy of Concordia — officially as a student, actually as a political asset on loan to Prince Raymond, the Emperor's overlooked second son. Raymond needs an ally he can't be seen recruiting, in a succession fight he can't be seen wanting to win, against an older brother who treats people as assets to collect rather than problems to solve. Alain needs somewhere to put five years of war that has nowhere left to go.

Neither of them intended for it to become real. Alain didn't intend for any of it to become real — not the friends who won't stay at arm's length, not the political war he's been drafted into, and least of all his arranged fiancée, Seliora, who is keeping a secret of her own that would destroy her if the wrong person noticed it first. Alain has spent five years learning how to be unreachable. The Academy is very slowly teaching him he isn't as good at it as he thought.

The Shadow and The Flame is a character-driven political fantasy about a weapon trying to learn how to be a person again, told across the shifting alliances, rivalries, and quiet dangers of a court that runs on people mistaking each other for exactly what they can be used for.