The Maiden's Rock

Prologue

The kingdom of Heathru is dying by inches. Three harvests have failed. The rivers are dust. In the capital of Velmoor, the markets grow thin and the noble council grows desperate, barricaded behind locked gates and crumbling certainty while the people outside them go hungry. Their answer came from old texts and older fear: the Rite of Appeasement. According to the council's scholars, Varathos the Ashen — the great dragon of the Cinderpeak Mountains — is Heathru's ancient protector, and he demands royal blood to bless the land with rain. Princess Flora has been taken in chains to the Maiden's Rock at the mountain's base, bound to an obsidian altar carved with runes no one living can fully read. The council calls it salvation. The cult enforcers on the mountain roads call it necessary. The princess, if anyone were listening, would call it a lie. She would be right. Varathos is no protector. He is a parasite who has slowly drained Heathru's lifeblood for centuries, and the drought is his final act before abandoning a kingdom he has already hollowed out. The truth is carved into the rock they chained her to — but truth, in Heathru, has become a dangerous thing to speak aloud. The dragon stirs in his lair above the Maiden's Rock. The sun beats down on the Ashfen Plains. And somewhere on the road to the Cinderpeak Mountains, someone is walking toward all of it anyway.