ACT II: THE PRICE OF POWER
The king has ridden west - to claim a blade older than the kingdom, in mountains older than the songs. But while Arthur faces trials that strip a man down to what he is actually made of, the kingdom he left behind begins to come apart from the inside.
In Camelot, Queen Guinevere is besieged by a presence that no longer asks. It offers - specifically, terribly - power to hold the walls and a child she once stopped praying for. She fights. She loses ground every night she sleeps.
At the council table, the king's cousin holds the regency with quiet competence - and the dark blade he has carried since autumn has begun, in his own thinking, to approve of him.
In the Wildlands, a wolf-king makes a bargain with the thing that killed his mother, knowing it for a trap, walking in anyway.
Beneath the city, a watcher with a face the eye slides off has begun to see something larger than her assignment - and the rule trained into her bones is beginning to feel like a leash.
These are not separate stories. They are the same machine, turning toward the same hour.
When the blood moon rises over the eastern range, three bloodlines bend toward a single design - and none of them yet understand what they have agreed to.
The Dark Trinity Chronicles continues. An Arthurian dark fantasy of vampires, shapechangers, and the oldest war of all.