Fighting Hemlock

Wroxton Devero Wryhta was a boy who asked too many questions - the kind that got him in trouble, the kind that made him see the gears behind the pageantry long before he understood what he was looking at. On the morning the world changed forever, he was standing in a laundromat, listening to a hijacked flight collapse two towers and a certainty he could no longer feel.What happens next isn't history. It's Hemlock.Pulled beyond the world he knew, Wroxton is thrown into a realm built from seven sectors of ordeal - a place where every mask he's ever worn is stripped away, where ancient and elegant evils offer him exactly what he's always wanted, dressed as mercy, dressed as power, dressed as love. A coin rides in his pocket, carving a virtue into itself each time he survives what should have broken him. He is offered thrones. He is offered forgetting. He is offered the shape of the one thing he can't stop loving, kneeling beside him again, asking for only one word in return.Fighting Hemlock is a war story, a temptation story, and - underneath both - a question the modern world doesn't like to ask out loud: what does a person actually owe to love, once they understand what love requires them to burn away?This is an epic for readers who feel the hollowness of easy answers and easier comforts - who suspect that the world has traded something real for something plastic, and want a story that doesn't flinch from naming it. It is not a promise that the world will heal. It is a testimony that standing is still possible, even now, even when the darkness has spread wider than history has ever recorded it.Some will read this as a war story. Some will read it as fever. For those who hear it as neither - this book was written to find you.