The Unbroken Three: Book One Baptism of Ash

Yesterday, Pete Carraway's biggest problem was a blocked drain on level six.

Today, he's naked, terrified, and standing in the exact middle of two armies about to collide — summoned out of his own bathroom into a world he doesn't understand, by a woman made of silver light who vanished the second the job was done.

On Ashkarra Prime, men are the rarest thing left alive. Two centuries ago, something broke the world's balance, and now sons are born one in eight — which means a six-and-a-half-foot Brisbane plumber with a smart mouth and an inconvenient gift for setting things on fire is worth more than any army in the field. Every nation on the continent would burn a province to own him. One already has soldiers dying to try.

Vharenna claims him first. Kaia — the deadly, deadpan officer assigned to keep him alive — hauls him off the battlefield in a rope she clearly resents tying. Serel, the matriarch running the war, decides within a day that a full elemental is worth more than she can afford to lose. And Mira, who buried a brother to untrained power decades ago, makes it her personal mission that Pete won't become the same kind of tragedy.

He trains. He bleeds. He falls — hard, and against every instinct he has — for the woman who was never supposed to be more than his handler. And when General Renata Voss brings the full weight of Ostrayne's army to Aldwatch's gates, determined to take what she's decided is rightfully hers, Pete discovers that surviving isn't the same as being safe, and that the people worth dying for are exactly the ones worth learning to live for.

Voss doesn't lose. She's never lost. Until now, she's never had a reason to try.

The Unbroken Three is epic fantasy with the pulse of a thriller and the mouth of a bloke who never asked to be a chosen one — irreverent, propulsive, and unwilling to let a siege, a war-queen, or an entire continent's worth of scarcity politics slow down a good laugh. Fans of Dungeon Crawler Carl and Bruce Sentar's harem-adventure energy will feel right at home; readers looking for real stakes, real grief, and a slow-burn romance that earns every inch of ground it takes will find plenty to hold onto here too.

He fell out of the sky into someone else's war. He's not planning on falling for it — but everyone around him has other ideas.