Dwarven Monk

A broken soldier. A stolen child. An empire that should have stayed buried. For a thousand years, the dwarven Imperium has crushed the world beneath its iron boot. Its forges never sleep. Its war machines have leveled kingdoms. Two-thirds of the known lands now answer to its ledger, and the peoples who once stood against it have been scattered, broken, or quietly erased from the maps. The Major served the Imperium for thirty years. He was their finest weapon, their most trusted blade. Then one morning, in a place he was never supposed to look, he saw what years of obedience had truly purchased - and his loyalty ended at the point of a knife. What followed should have killed him. It didn't. Pulled from a frozen river by an aging master of an ancient martial tradition, the Major is given something he never expected to have again - a second chance. A village hidden in the mountains. A teacher who sees what he could still become. And, in time, something he never thought a man like him deserved: to become a father. For years, he believes the past is buried. The past, it turns out, has not finished with him. When the Imperium reaches into his quiet life and takes from him the one thing he cannot live without, the Major puts down the monk's robes and picks up something far older. He forges new weapons from the armor of the dead. He sets out alone into a world that has been waiting for someone like him to come back. But the road ahead winds through forests where elven archers wait with arrows already drawn - through hidden cities whose people burned their own libraries to escape the empire's grasp - through mountains held by a stone-skinned people who have not forgotten their stolen children - and toward an enemy who has been waiting a very long time for the chance to finish what he started. To survive what is coming, he must use his mastery of the deadly martial art known as the Thunder Claw Path and become the Dwarven Monk. Perfect for fans of Pierce Brown's RED RISING, Will Wight's CRADLE, and the political-fantasy intensity of Joe Abercrombie's FIRST LAW. A sweeping debut of vengeance, redemption, and the family we choose - for readers who like their fantasy with mountains in it, martial-arts mastery on every page, and a hero who has earned every scar he carries.