The Hollow Brand · Book One

The Hollow Brand: Year One

A Greek Myth Progression Fantasy

His House trained him to hold the door. The stone gave him what was locked behind it.

A Kallias holds the door. Whoever comes through it comes through him.

Kaelen Kallias has spent eleven years in the yard, training for one thing: Aegis, the Shield, the Brand his House has always carried at the front of the four. House Kallias needs it. Its lamp has been out six years, since twenty of its people went down the bronze door into the Deep and did not come back. His mother was one of them. The law gives a dark lamp seven years. One more, and the Hold will strike the name of Kallias from the founding roll.

On the day of the Test, something breaks loose from behind a door his House built long ago. When it is over, an old keeper is dead, the thing behind the door is ash, and the mark on Kaelen’s right hand is one the Hold has not seen in four hundred years.

The Hollow. A Brand that takes from the dead: Cores, beast gifts, even the Brand of a man still warm. A Brand that was banned for a reason.

Now a voice in his sword, older than the Hold itself, weaves a lie over his hand, and the stone reads him as an Elementalist. His Iron year at the Hold in Hermes’ city has begun: hunts in the vale, the labour board, rival Houses, and wrong beasts rising out of the ground. And the Hollow always wants more.

What will Kaelen let it take?

The Hollow Brand: Year One is Book One of The Hollow Brand: a Greek myth progression fantasy of gods and monsters, Brands and ranks, and one year at the Hold.