Prologue
The smoke tells only one story—and it is always the same story. Edrin’s last stand. Pannath’s impossible shield. A baby’s hand reaching from a red cloak.
Read the Prologue
Cover art by Nathan Alberg — with appreciation.
Book One · An epic fantasy
The Ash and the Seed
From darkness, light remains.
On the first morning of winter’s frost, a hunter returns to find his home in flames.
A girl raised among wandering tribes learns to hear the patterns beneath the world—the hum of creation in fire, water, stone, and wind. She learns the old tongue: a language that can heal or destroy depending on who speaks it—and why.
Something beyond the mountains commands where the old tongue only asks. The things it makes bleed red, breathe, and were never given souls. Feuds keep the tribes apart while the road east pulls harder. She must decide what her gift is for—and what it must never become.
Told across many winter nights by an Elder to seven children at the hearth—while outside the snares come back empty, and the hunters have stopped saying what they found.
Also in paperback on release day
Sample the opening
The Prologue
Prefer a shorter door in? The prologue stands on its own: the night the glen burned, and the name carved into stone.
The series
The Breath and the Word
The language that made the world can heal it—or rewrite flesh into myth.
The darkness is not the end—it is only the space between one light and the next.
The Breath and the Word follows the old tongue—the language of creation—from a ruined glen into a wider war for what the world was meant to be.
Listeners learn to ask creation to agree—never to command it. Against them rise empty hungers and older powers that would rather be worshipped than serve. The road only deepens the question.
The story asks the same hard question: can the world be mended without crowning a new god?
Jonn Berg
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News and release notes for Book One, Book Two, and the road beyond — only when something is ready to hold. Depending on interest and need, you may not get picked to receive a preview copy.
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