Amal and the Shapeshifters

In the third century, when Rome's reach ended and Persia's began, three men rode east toward something that had learned to wear human faces.

Amal could see through them—barely. That was the problem.

Amal has a gift most people would call impossible: he can see the Pattern, the threads of faith and love connecting one believer to another across the known world. It's saved lives before. But he's still learning to trust it, still more apprentice than master, when the threads in a small Persian village start turning wrong. Distorted—like something is wearing them down from the inside.

His mentors, Bazir and Tenjri, take him east to find out why. What they discover isn't persecution, and it isn't war. It's something older than either—a thing that doesn't kill the people it feeds on. It replaces them, one familiar face at a time, until no one in the village can be certain who they're sitting across the table from anymore.

Amal has power he doesn't fully understand. Teachers who won't hand him easy answers. And a village running out of time to save the people it's already lost.

What he learns in that house at the edge of the Persian border—about the line between reaching for his gift and trusting it to work through him—will follow him for the rest of his life.

Amal and the Shapeshifters is a standalone novelette set in the world of The Halls of the Shadow King series, following the same young man readers meet in The Apprentice—years before Rome, before the Shadow King's network, when he was still finding out what he was capable of.

If you love historical fantasy with real spiritual stakes, ancient evil that wears a human face, and heroes who have to earn their courage rather than simply have it—this one's free, and it's ready when you are.