The Black Oak

The Year of the Sundered Moon, 317 A.C. The Age of Fire is ending in ash and silence.

No knight has returned from the slopes of Mount Cinder. No prayer has pierced the smoke-choked sky. In the dying village of Barkhaven, beneath the shadow of the great dragon Ignis, only three souls remain who remember a time before fear: a broken knight armored in regret, a herbalist who speaks the language of beasts, and an ancient keeper who tends a tree grown from a dragon’s scale.

Sir Kaelen of Eldoria does not come for glory. Branded a coward for an act of mercy that doomed a hundred souls, he carries a sword that weighs more than steel—it carries the truth. And truth, in this blighted place, is a fire more dangerous than any dragon’s breath.

But Ignis, the Emberheart, is not what he seems. A creature of obsidian and molten grief, it remembers being human. It remembers a song. And it remembers the knight who now stands before it, not as a slayer, but as the answer to a centuries-old curse.

This is a tale woven from forensic fantasy and noir-tinged moral complexity, where memory loss spreads like a virus, dragonbone conducts the sound of the past, and every scar tells a story. In a world where the line between monster and savior is written in ash, one truth remains: The Black Oak does not heal. It reveals.