The Hollow Vow

When King Theron IV awakens from a decade of silence wearing a stranger's face, the realm erupts into whispered accusations of sorcery, murder, and stolen succession. Cartographer Aldric Vane is summoned not by messenger but by absence itself, an unnatural silence that drags him from his cell of maps into a conspiracy where every document has been redrawn by something that walks in the king's skin. Cardinal Malachai Dren guards a forbidden vow made in a cathedral of bones; Warden Hesta commands the Hollow Men, soldiers who obey no living throat. A cloaked blade stalks the witnesses, while Corin Ash and Seraphine Quill chase a drowned surveyor who surfaced with impossible knowledge. A skin-and-iron golem stalks the archives, and a Petrified King of Mournhold waits beneath a sealed tomb for a promise to be kept. As Vesper Kael's old journal reveals the blueprint of a centuries-old deception and Mira Quill's ledger exposes the kingdom's blood economy, Vane realizes the king is not restored, he is worn. The creature beneath the crown has chosen him to be the cartographer of a new world, and his only map out is drawn in the language of a vow he never made.