Blood & Fire: The Damned

Before he ascended the throne, taking control of his planet through assassination and deceit, before he unleashed war and famine, disease and chaos, he stood before the Oracle.

Its hyper-advanced mind bore him a prophecy of the future, born of its simulations.

'When the five become one. When the Twice Born sits on her throne, and seven kingdoms become six. When the divine empire falls, to ruin and ambition. When Amanarath sings the last song of a dead God. The Great One will awaken. Destruction and conquest will follow. Till the child of four worlds unites Hell against itself. The rivers of every world will run red, as their oceans swell with the dead. Strife will consume all.

There will be nothing but Blood & Fire.'

Long ago, ancient humans were taken from Earth, enslaved, experimented on, eaten, treated as pets, for centuries. When plague ran through their captors, they rose up, took their captors' technology and transcended their limits. Now they are coming home, and to them, humanity is an infestation to be cleansed.

Dugan of Valukaa has lived and died for 1500 years. Burdened with the epithet, the Lord of Ash, and memories of his heinous deeds, he has spent the past 800 years trying to fulfil a vow he made to protect humanity. A vow he has failed at more often than not. When an old friend comes knocking, bleeding, dying, asking him to take up his vow once more and protect humanity from a mystical device known as the Oribas, he must once again reckon with his nightmares and with his true nature.

He will not do it alone. Across the world, four strangers are being entangled in the same war.

An ex-MI6 agent with an insatiable lust for violence and bloodshed.

A haunted surgeon, breaking the law to keep his oath and setting in motion a series of events that will kill more than he could ever save.

A woman, unmade by trauma and violation, turning herself into a weapon.

And a college student, enamoured by science, who finds his body is something he cannot explain, and comes home to find dead parents, and the ability to tear angels from the sky.

They will learn that there's a kernel of truth to all the myths and legends they've been told. But the truth is stranger than they could ever have imagined.

They must learn to trust each other, and together they may save the world — or be its undoing. For they know not the roles they are to play in the wars to come.

Blood & Fire is an epic science fantasy told across five perspectives — a war 15,000 years in the making, and the unlikely souls who stand between Earth and a hostile universe.