Fires of an Empire Saga

The Emperor of Perinthia rules with an iron fist. Young boys are torn from their families at just ten years old, forced into military conscription. Soldiers are forbidden from marrying, while only the Emperor's loyal officers and nobility are permitted wives. Beliefs outside the greatness of the throne have been brutally crushed - temples burned, devotees killed or enslaved. Yet a glimmer of hope persists in secret. Roshin grew up an orphan on the docks of the southern port city of Ancalah. Taken in by a sister of the faith of Hulen Ahir, she was trained in the healing arts, as well as the forbidden truths of the old religion. Traveling the country as a healer, Roshin has witnessed the Empire's oppressive degradation of the social order. But the reality hits home when she and her companions are seized and sold into bondage. With her world consumed by darkness, Roshin clings to the faith's prophecy - that light will come on the back of a dragon, when a destined rider rises again to crush the Empire's tyranny. And now, it seems that rider has arrived.

This is a collation of the first two books in the Fires of an Empire Saga. It tells the chronological story of "Fire from Ashes," and "Waves of a Tempest" as the events of the parallel tales unfold. In an empire where dissent means death, ancient faiths are crushed and young boys are torn from their families to feed a hungry military, two paths, forged in desperation, are about to collide. Ciran bears the scars of a soldier's life, but his greatest wounds are the ones that drove him to desert. Now he runs, pursued by his past and the empire's blade, seeking a kind of freedom that may not exist. Beyond the mountains, he discovers a truth that threatens to upend everything he thought he knew. Roshin, an orphaned healer versed in forbidden lore, witnesses the empire's cruelty daily in the broken bodies she tends. When she and her companions fall prey to the very darkness she fights against, her faith in an ancient prophecy is all that keeps her spirit alive. In a land where hope itself is treason, their paths converge in a story of faith, choice, and the price of freedom.

Ciran did it. He survived his torture, and stood up against the empire's cruelty. He is now again free to resume the search for his family. He has returned to his old stomping ground, the walled stone city of Dunmaer. The city looks to hold the key he has been searching for as to where they might have gone, but the effects of his ordeal linger and his survival is far from certain. His path is now set to cross with a healer named Roshin, who found herself in the city as part of a mission to spread hope to the people through word of the coming of a prophet. One small problem, it seems she believes that prophet is him! He's fine to just ignore such talk as the ramblings of the dogmatic followers of the faith, but then the secret of what he has been hiding in the woods is discovered, and he finds himself challenged again with a responsibility he's not sure he wants. Will he heed the call and listen to the believers? Or is the sacrifice of doing so too great to bear?

I feel like this is enough: Ciran has emerged as the prophesied leader who will challenge the Empire's iron grip on Perinthia. With the aid of his growing army of deserters and a partnership with a fierce turquoise dragon, he's quickly spreading hope, and cutting Empire supply lines. The Empire however is not ready to fall. Responding to a growing discontent amongst the soldiers as the food supply shrinks, the officers have turned their arrows directly at the dragon rider's chest, for they understand him to be the heart of the resistance. But a successful revolution is not won by only one man, and even a prophet must understand his own limits. The success of the revolution hangs on Ciran's ability to build a coalition of capable others to lean on and lead with him, for his fate is not so certain.