Overture of Shadow

Dorian Silversong is a wandering bard and one of the most gifted Muse-touched performers alive — a man who can put a knife-wielding bandit to sleep with a lullaby and move an audience to tears with a single note. He has spent twenty years avoiding the politics of the capital. Then his mentor sends an urgent summons, and everything changes.

By the time Dorian arrives, the headmaster is dead. Master artisans are vanishing across the kingdom — a blacksmith, a glassblower, a stonemason — each one Muse-touched, each one gone without a trace. And the man who has seized control of the Royal Bardic Council carries something cold and wrong behind his eyes.

What begins as a murder mystery becomes a race to stop an ancient catastrophe. A secret older than the kingdom is waking up beneath the bones of Breheimen, and Dorian's Muse-touched gifts — the ability to compel, persuade, and inspire — may be the only weapons that can stop what's coming. But an enemy that corrupts the creative gift from the inside out is something no bard has faced in five hundred years.

Some songs are worth dying for. Some silences cannot be allowed to stand.