Life is cruel. We must meet it with Spear and Sword.

Ages have passed since the fall of the Ancient Kingdom, yet legends of its executioners, the Soo’h, still remain: a dynasty of sword demons capable of felling giants and cleaving mountains. The foolhardy curse their name. The wise whisper it in fear. Their memory haunts the very land of the twin continents of Asa’in and Edorrar—but after 4,000 years, it begins to awaken.

In the snowy forestlands of northern Asa’in, the young sorcerer apprentice Tandu embarks on a peacekeeping mission on behalf of her order, the Shadow Towers. Though tensions are high following the theft of a magical artifact from the time of the Ancient Kingdom, Tandu hopes she can prevent war from engulfing the north, as it once did her home. War, she knows, creates only orphans and slaves.

At the heart of Edorarr, one such slave is fighting for his life—and the lives of his companions. Rahlon cannot remember anything from his life before being sold into slavery, yet he is willing to do anything to protect it. In the great gladiator arena of the southern empire, his bravery and ferocity draw both admiration from his friends—and the ire of his masters.

The exiled battlemaster, Eryk, is one of those friends. Hardened by years of fighting away from his homeland, Eryk trains Rahlon in the hope that the young gladiator can succeed where he did not and win his freedom. But Eryk’s kindness hides a dark secret, one that connects Rahlon’s forgotten past and the dark shadow that amasses at the northern edges of the world…

Old threats emerge, and new alliances are forged and broken, as the key to the survival of all lies with a young slave whose destiny pulls him towards the one place he must never return to.