The Scorched Reckoning

The crisis was over. The work had just begun.

Three months after healing the corruption beneath the northern glacier, Callen Nasinth believes the long road is finally behind him. The Baron will die in a stone cell. His daughter thrives, his dragon watches from the cliff, and for the first time in years, the forge is only a forge.

Then a stranger walks out of unmapped country with a knife wound in his chest and a phrase meant for one man on the continent: The seed still sleeps. Tell the Singer who healed the ice.

The message is older than the corruption. Older than the Dragon Singers themselves. Somewhere west of every map Callen has seen, a watch-post network has stood vigil for centuries — and what he did at the glacier has rung a bell that cannot be unrung.

To answer the call, Callen must cross country no living person has walked, tested at every step by a road that does not announce itself as a road. Waiting at a threshold carved into volcanic stone is a rival tradition eight centuries in the making — a Purifier trained since childhood to end bonds like his, a dying watcher with half a message left to give, and at the edges of the firelight, a figure counting names in a language no one living speaks.

The counting is not hostile. It is not kind.

And Callen's name has just been added to the list.

He solved the last crisis. He didn't know he had started the next.