The Ghost Cauldron: Cover and Release Date

 

Here we are at last. Behold the cover to the third and final book in my long-gestating trilogy, The Battle for Majadan. I'm really happy with how all of my covers came out, thanks to the wonderful Olivia Pro Design. If you're an indie author, be sure to check her out!

The next bit of news is, of course, the release date: February 28, 2022. (Yay, the crowd goes wild.) Yes, if you scroll back through my blog posts, you'll see that's quite a bit later than I'd planned. But to quote Professor Tolkien, "The story grew in the telling." It's finished, but it just needs two more months of spit and polish before it's ready for public consumption. You can, however, pre-order the ebook now while you're in that holiday shopping-spree spirit. 

The Ghost Cauldron, like the first two books in the series, will be Amazon-exclusive and available free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers. Here's  the blurb for your blurb-reading pleasure:

No peace for the living, no rest for the dead.

As the Wight Lords’ armies march across the world, former fugitive and refugee Aust returns home to where the invasion began. He arrives in the devastated city of Majadan to join an underground resistance, but his allies are fractured and their leaders vie for power while his friend Shadmar Dukane wages a reckless, private war.

Shadmar escaped Majadan as a broken man. Now he has become an engineer of vengeance, a ruthless mage and torturer who’ll stop at nothing to destroy the Wights. His victories have made him a hero of the resistance, but Aust fears that the longer Shadmar spirals into darkness, the more of his humanity he’ll lose along the way.

But Shadmar and Aust don’t stand against the Wights alone. Eris was one of those killed in the invasion, but she and the spirits of the dead on both sides are trapped, unable to escape from the city. Forging an alliance with her slain former enemies, Eris leads a ghost rebellion to free the captive dead, for the Wight Lords’ atrocities go deeper than any of the living suspect.

When all three factions of the conflict converge, Aust learns that every slain foe becomes fuel for the Wight Lords’ final weapon, a cauldron that burns the souls of the dead and converts them into raw magic. As the shape of the Wight Lords’ agenda becomes clear, Aust will have to make an impossible choice, lest the world be consumed in an ultimate battle that neither the living nor dead will escape.