Caden Un has no family name, no past worth claiming, and no illusions about either. Raised in a warrior orphanage, he lives by one rule: win today. It has always been enough.
Then a royal prince comes looking for someone expendable on a northern expedition, and Caden says yes.
What he steps into is older than politics. Long ago, the world erased a people and called it peace - the Twiceborn, shapeshifters who ruled the northern reaches for centuries, destroyed in a single coordinated night, their history rewritten into warning tales. Caden knows none of this. But the warlord watching from the ridge does. When his scouts return with two words about the new fighter in the prince's party - moves wrong - eighteen years of patient dread begins to stir.
The boy who learned to survive in blood-sand is about to find out what he was built for. The answer is going to cost him the only thing he ever trusted.
Ashes of the Unnamed King is the opening book of The Twiceborn Reckoning - an epic fantasy series about inheritance, identity, and what it costs to reclaim a stolen name.