Hero Dawn: The Shadow of Peace

King Walter Howsard is dead — stabbed through the heart on the night of his 70th birthday, his body thrown from the terrace of his own castle, by an assassin wearing a Paladin armor. The Anthem Empire, twenty years into an uneasy peace, has no shortage of enemies. But the smell of sulfur that lingered tells one man a different story.Gaius Emile Trasque — former High Master of the Sentries, living legend who’s battled the darkness — believes the king's death is not the end of something. It is the beginning. Across the Empire, in the rain-soaked stone city of Cromwell, Bastius Bloome has returned from a voyage that should have killed him. The only survivor, without his Prowess, and without any will to be what he once trained to become.The Shadow of Peace is the story of what festers in peacetime, when the world decides the darkness is gone and stops watching for it. It is a mystery, a reckoning, and a call to arms — told through an empire of six states that has forgotten why the Sentries existed in the first place."However terrible war was, it kept us united…”— King Walter Howsard, his final speech