He outlived every world. He never outlived one morning.
Rome burns, and Cain is still walking.
Plague empties the villages he passes through. Machines take the work of hands. Trenches swallow a generation of sons. Empires rise on the promise that they will last, and Cain watches every one of them go into the ground, because outliving the world turns out to be the same thing as burying it.
His own blood has organised itself in his absence. The Line has houses now, and doctrines, and a man called Dariel who has decided what the deathless are owed by everyone else. He does not want Cain's forgiveness. He wants his blessing.
Refusing it will cost more than Cain has left to lose.
And at the end of all of it, the oldest question in the world is still waiting for him in an ordinary field at sunrise.
The conclusion of The First Exile Trilogy, a mythic dark fantasy for readers of literary vampire fiction and biblical retellings. Begin with Exile from Eden.