The Divided Path

A dying monster told Galix that a day would come when strength and faith divide him - and that he would kneel to whichever was left. He didn't believe it. He was three-and-twenty, and he had never once failed.

Something has woken in the north. The dead are walking in the high country, the goblins are running south, and a dragon has come back into a sky that forgot them centuries ago.

Sir Galix of the white is the finest young paladin his Order has produced. When orcs land on the northern coast, the King sends him to learn the truth of them - and drive them out before they take root. Then an ambush leaves him broken at the bottom of a gorge, and the one who digs him out is Keira: a huntress of the Wood Folk, whose people have spent generations paying in blood for the last mercy their land ever showed a desperate stranger.

What they find behind the orc wall isn't an invasion. It's a people running - children, elders, wounded - from a fire across the sea that crosses a valley at midday and leaves nothing behind but silence and glass.

Galix carries the truth south, certain it will be enough. The white city hears every word of it, and sharpens it into a reason to march faster.

And through the deep woods, a northman with an ancient blade on his back is still hunting the goblins toward the thing that's driving them - on a road that ends where all three roads end: at the foot of the fire itself.

The Divided Path is the third book of The Age of Ash - a six-book epic fantasy saga for readers of David Gemmell and John Gwynne. The company that will stand against the fire is almost assembled. This is the book where their roads collide - no profanity, no explicit content.