Birth of Chaos

On the first day of summer, a butcher hunts a street urchin through the sun-scorched streets of Ashcroft. By nightfall, one of them is dead—and the Empire of Yolak begins to crack. Across a continent on the edge of collapse, lives once kept apart are drawn into the same gathering storm. Callahan, a boy marked by a past he can’t fully remember, is hurled into flight after defending himself from a man who believed him a murderer. His survival becomes the first stitch in a tapestry far larger than he understands. Benedict, the Empire’s most cunning mind, sees danger where others see coincidence. Whispers of vanished royals, strange omens, and an old enemy stirring force him to confront the truth no one else dares name. Trell, bound by duty to an Empress slipping from the world, walks a fragile line between faith, power, and the ghosts of the vows he broke. His past with the Church is a wound that never truly closed—and one that may yet shape the Empire’s future.