You Should Not Read This Book
You shouldn't read this book.
Not if you're reading it because you know me. Not if you're reading it to be nice. I love that impulse—genuinely—but I'd rather be honest with you upfront than have you finish it and spend energy being kind about something that was never going to be your thing.
The reader this book is for
They crave stories that force them to sit uncomfortably with a question. Not stories that pose a question and then answer it cleanly by the final chapter—stories that hand you the question and leave you holding it.
The question this book keeps circling is not a new one: how much should you sacrifice to save other people? I've been turning it over for three years. I still don't have an answer, which is probably why I wrote three books about it.
My protagonist believes he answers it correctly. He is wrong. And the most devastating part—the part I kept returning to as I wrote it—is that he was manipulated into his certainty. He made his choice based on a truth that was constructed for him. He'll spend the rest of the trilogy living inside the consequences of a decision he believes was right, and was not.
That kind of story is not comfortable. It is not designed to be. If you need your protagonist to be someone you can root for without reservation, this book will exhaust you. But if you've ever watched someone, in fiction or in life, do the wrong thing for completely understandable reasons, and felt the particular grief of that, then you're exactly who I wrote this for.
The politics are central to the story
In Valonia, three temples function as extensions of the government. They have always collaborated with the throne—not out of loyalty, but because collaboration has always served them. That changes in this story.
Every council scene is a power move. The temples have access to magic; the people who run the machinery of government do not. That discrepancy shapes everything about how power is accumulated, maintained, and lost in this world.
If political maneuvering bores you, this book will be a difficult read.
The magic costs something real
I grew up surrounded by brothers who read fantasy seriously, and when I told them I was writing one, they were very clear with me: the magic needs rules. It can't do everything. It can't be limitless. The most interesting magic, they said, is magic that costs something real.
I took that seriously.
In Valonia, the magic is imperfect and specific to each temple. The priests of Lex taste iron when someone lies—literally, blood in their mouth. These priests learn at an early age how to navigate the world when almost everyone around you is lying.
The healers of Estia give something of themselves each time they heal—the complexity of the healing determines the cost. The decision of when to use their power, and whether it's worth it, is never abstract.
The point isn't the mechanics. The magic in Valonia is not here to solve problems.
This is a tragedy in the classical sense
I read Antigone in high school and it has never fully left me. What stayed with me wasn't the drama of it, it was Antigone's clarity. She knew what she believed. She knew what it would cost and she did it anyway.
Another reason why the story resonated with me is because my brother David died when I was twelve. I'd like to think I would have done the same—risked everything to give him a burial, to honor him the way he deserved. Grief teaches you something about that kind of loyalty. About the decisions you make when the alternative is something you can't live with.
That's the tradition this book comes from. Not darkness for shock value, but tragedy in the oldest sense—where the very actions characters take to prevent catastrophe become the source of it. Events follow a kind of inevitability. Choices compound. There is hope in this story. It doesn't win in Book One.
I know that's a difficult ask. I spent time worrying whether readers would trust me enough to follow me through the darkness of Books One and Two, knowing the story doesn't resolve cleanly for a long time. What I kept coming back to is this: the stories that have stayed with me longest are the ones that didn't protect me from the hard parts. They trusted me to handle them.
I'm extending that same trust to you.
You'll see it from every side
This is a multi-POV book. Several characters carry the story—not just the protagonist, but the people who oppose him, the people who are trying to survive him, and the people who believe they are saving everyone, including him, through choices that are genuinely terrible. You won't like some of the characters, but to be honest to the story, they needed a voice.
I don't think any of my villains are actually villains. That's the part that took longest to write—being genuinely inside the head of someone doing something I found reprehensible, and making their reasoning track. Not excusing it. Just making it make sense. I needed you to understand why they made the choice they made, even if you hate them for it.
I've always been drawn to that kind of storytelling. Even when I disagree with a character's choices, understanding why they made them—really understanding it, from the inside—changes how I hold the story. Nobody in this book is a caricature. Nobody is simply wrong about everything. They're wrong about the thing that destroys them, and they have reasons, and those reasons make sense.
That's the kind of story I wanted to write. The kind where the villain isn't the villain because they're evil, but because they believe, completely, that they're right.
If you're still deciding
Readers who loved The Poppy War for what it said about divine cost and the horror of power—this book is in that conversation. Readers who loved The First Law for its refusal to let the protagonist stay clean—this book is in that conversation too. I'm a different writer than those authors, and I'm not claiming the same scale of world-building. But that's the spirit I was reaching for.
If half of what I've described sounds right and the other half sounds like a lot—you might still be in the right place. The best way to find out is to read the deleted scene I wrote before the book existed. It's a small piece of the world, outside the main timeline, and it will tell you quickly whether Valonia is somewhere you want to spend time.
The Emperor's Shadow releases October 12, 2026. If you want to be there from the beginning, the newsletter is where that happens.