The Thief of Broken Crowns

Synopsis

Arthur Pendragon never wanted a throne. In this story, he never got one. Pulled from the moment just before he drew the sword from the stone, he is hurled into the Continent — a fractured, rain-soaked world where kings are footnotes and monsters write the history books. He arrives with nothing: no Excalibur, no Merlin, no Round Table. Only a quick tongue, nimble fingers, and a stubborn belief that the weak deserve protecting. Stripped of destiny, Arthur reinvents himself as Ren the Pale, a celebrated outlaw who runs grain and medicine to plague-ravaged villages by stealing from the coffers of the monster-hunting guilds — mercenary brotherhoods that hoard coin and contracts while peasants rot in cursed hamlets. He is charming and reckless, beloved in the villages he bleeds himself dry to protect. But the Continent does not reward nobility. It punishes it. When a contracted witcher arrives in the river town of Ashford to exterminate a creature the villagers have quietly been sheltering, Arthur is forced to intervene — and discovers the creature is no monster at all, but a cursed child bound by old magic. To break the curse and save the child, Arthur must barter, steal, and fight his way through guild enforcers, a ruthless sorceress with her own agenda, and the creeping pestilence spreading from the Bruxa-haunted marshes south of Ashford. As the body count rises, the boy who was meant to be a king must learn a darker lesson: justice in a broken world is not a sword pulled from stone. It is a knife pressed to the throat of necessity, wielded by hands that are never quite clean. He will not save the Continent. But he might save this one town. That, he decides, is enough.