Overview

Calum is done. Just done—with everything.

Too bad fate just sent a snarky blue-eyed man to shatter his resolve…or drive him into madness.

For more than five thousand years, Calum has been trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of death and immediate rebirth, burdened with all his previous lives’ memories. He is never able to stay in one place for very long, compelled to wander the lands and seas alone. Searching, always searching for something that calls to his soul like a moth drawn to a flame that is always just out of reach. Over the long millennia, stories of others that shared his unending fate began to be whispered in the dark corners of taverns and over the cookfires of soldiers. Unsettling stories of men who were not quite men that walked among them for various nefarious purposes…

First-Souls.

A curse? Punishment for some forgotten atrocity? Or just a cruel game meant for the gods’ amusement where only they know the rules? If so, then he sure as hell was done being their pawn. For the first time in all his hundreds of lives, Calum abandons his wanderings and his desire for answers and settles in an isolated town in the kingdom of Sarim, determined to resist the strong urge to be on the move that has dictated his entire existence.

However, after a brutal attack by a shadowy group of ruthless hunters that covet a First-Soul’s “immortality,” a complication in the form of Hadrian drops directly in his path during his desperate escape, a snarky First-Soul that offers Calum his first tantalizing hint to maybe answer the mystery behind that “something” that’s been calling to them from the moment of their first birth. Hadrian is loud, much too talkative, and loves to tease Calum to the brink of rage. Worse, ever since they locked eyes for the first time, he has been unable to leave Hadrian without feeling a terrible, encompassing pain that worsens with every step.

Yet, there’s no denying that the irritating ass has also awakened a madness deep within his soul that makes Calum long to touch, to want…he’s not sure what exactly, from Hadrian. Add to that confusion a meeting with a mythical monk whose own problems have suddenly become theirs, unprecedented numbers of First-Soul hunters dogging their every step, rumors of a possible war brewing in the kingdom, and slavers, and Calum begins to wonder if he shouldn’t have slit Hadrian’s throat—or his own—when they first met, after all…

This is the beginning of an MM epic fantasy trilogy with a slow-burn romance and more adventure than even Hadrian bargained for. It features a grumpy, knife-happy man, his antithesis, a snarky, relentless teaser, and a third wheel in the form of an ancient, somehow clueless monk in the midst of a burgeoning existential crisis who needs to find a love of his own. Also contains a steamy scene, mature language, and descriptions of, as well as on-page scenes of violence and torture.