The Mirk Years (The Wardstane Chronicles)

By Raymond Stone

Book 4 of The Wardstane Chronicles.

The Elfin road is shut, the teind is ended, the enemy's army is penned, and none of it saves the realm from the mirk. Wallace is taken and quartered and his body sent to four towns to teach a country despair; and the despair grows, in floods, and the penned Host does not need the deep roads any more, for the harvest comes to it everywhere. Bruce murders the Red Comyn before an altar and is crowned in the blood of it and excommunicate, and is crushed at Methven and scattered, his women caged and his brothers hanged, himself hunted through the west like a beast; and the whole realm becomes one field of despair, with no field to fight it on, only the slow universal dark. And the order, that has always contested the harvest, breaks under this one, for it is everywhere at once, and the eldest Warden is dying. This is the book that asks whether the order itself can be broken, and nearly answers yes: the mentor is lost, the roll thinned, every strand of the fellowship broken in its turn; and it learns, at the very bottom, the hardest truths it knows, that the office is for the witnessing and not the helping, that a fellowship that carries its own broken cannot be broken, that there is a floor to the dark, that you keep the warmth against every cruelty; and it learns, as a hunted king in a cave is learning, that the bottom is where things turn, and that the not-quitting, unrewarded, in the dark, is itself the turning. Every recorded event happens exactly as history says. Everything the chronicles could not see is at stake.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HHF6BMDH
• ISBN13: 9798170712779
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.6" x 6.0"