He survived the fire. He won't survive unchanged.
Eirik keeps the Ashen Flagon running on honest measure, good ale, and the belief that a quiet life can be earned. When that life is answered with fire, everything he has built collapses overnight, and Eirik is forced onto the road as a witness to a power he was never meant to survive.
Hunted by the man responsible for the ruin of his home, Eirik falls in with unlikely companions and is drawn into the hidden workings of Vitae, a dangerous art where meaning is bound into matter and mistakes leave scars on the land and the mind. Lords wield it through secrecy, rigid rules and brute repetition. Eirik survives it by instinct, restraint, and by listening when it pushes back.
As bandits, monsters, and the remnants of past workings close in, it becomes clear that Eirik’s way of using Vitae is more destabilizing than open defiance. In a world built on fear and fixed meanings, a man who treats power as a conversation may be impossible to control.
