ASHBORN KING

A Novel of the Cinderlands

He was born from ash and prophecy.

He chose neither

Prologue: The Prophecy of Ash

From the Oral Records of the Cinderlands — Keeper Thessaly, Year of the Third Burning

In the year the Ashen Throne broke apart, the Court Oracles did not dream.

This was the first sign.

For eleven nights the Oracles sat in their tower of white bone and stared at the ceiling and felt nothing — no visions, no fragments, no the-world-is-telling-you-something that had guided the empire for three hundred years. The chief Oracle, a woman named Sable who had correctly predicted four wars, two famines, and the precise hour of the old emperor's death, sat in her chamber and felt only the absence of knowing.

On the twelfth night, the Ashen Throne — the great seat of the Cinderlands empire, carved from the meteorite that had ended the First Age and on which every ruler since had been crowned — cracked down the middle. Not from impact. Not from age. The stone simply decided to split, and it did, and the sound of it was heard across the capital city of Vardenmoor like a single enormous heartbeat.

On the thirteenth night, Sable dreamed.

What she saw, she wrote down immediately upon waking, in the cramped script of someone trying to outrun forgetting:

Born from the burning of the old and the silence of what came before — a child of neither blood nor title. The ash will know him. The throne will know him. But he will not know himself until the choice is given and the choice is refused, and in the refusal: the third thing. Not king. Not ash. Something the prophecy does not have a word for yet.

He will be offered the crown twice. The second offer will be genuine. He will refuse it both times.

What comes after the second refusal — this is what the world is waiting for.

Sable gave the prophecy to the High Council and went back to her room and did not sleep again for three days.

She had written thirty-seven prophecies in her career. Twenty-nine had come true. Seven were still pending.

This was the only one she had ever been afraid of.

Not because of what it predicted.

Because of the word she'd used: something the prophecy does not have a word for yet.

She had never written that before. She had not chosen to write it. It had written itself, and she had watched her own hand form the letters with the curious detachment of a person watching someone else's dream.

She folded the paper. She put it in the archive.

She waited.

Three days later, in the burning village of Cinder's Edge — a settlement so far from the capital that the news of the cracked throne had not yet arrived — a woman died giving birth to a boy, and the midwife who caught him said later that when she held him up, the ash from the village fire — they'd been burning the autumn waste — swirled toward him in a circle, and stayed, and did not settle.

The midwife did not know about the prophecy.

She named him Kael, which meant simply: the one who survived.