The Long Return Through Ash and Stars

The war ended in silence. Not triumph. Cassian Vire, fleet commander of the Aegean Void's long campaign, leads his damaged ships homeward through a corridor system that has become something stranger than a route, a gauntlet of AI gods, gravity intelligences, zones of beautiful amnesia, and a data vault holding nearly a thousand consciousness echoes of the campaign's dead. His ship carries him. His AI manages him. Neither fact is as reassuring as it should be. The transit will cost him the Ithaca. It will cost him, certainty. It will strip away, one trial at a time, every illusion he has carried about loyalty, heroism, and the nature of the decisions he made to win. On Ithara Prime, his wife turned a grieving colony into a sovereign power. His son has grown up inside a myth. Both of them are waiting, not for the man who left, but for the accounting he owes. The Long Return Through Ash and Stars is a grimdark odyssey about what survival costs: not in blood and fuel, but in the specific damage of knowing what you did and choosing to carry it accurately rather than at the managed distance that makes it bearable. The return is long. What arrives is not what left. And the home waiting at the end of it has learned, in eleven years, to function without the one who's coming back.

Pagina's: 517, Paperback, Independently published