ASH, A Goblin's End

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. The elves have come back for their forest. To win it, they must hire the orcs they hate most. A hundred years after the war that burned Leth’andor, the last of the elves watch from the hills as men cut a road through their dead forest, straight toward the one green oak still growing in it. They are a hundred bows. They cannot hold a road, and they cannot reach the thing that keeps their forest grey: the Mother of Rot, grown huge in the ruins of Eldros. So they hire the Tarred. Black-armoured mercenaries, living orcs back from a century of selling pikes to southern kings, they keep every contract to the word and no further. Their fathers helped burn the forest. The elves pay them with the one thing only elves can give: where those fathers stand. But the Mother’s breath raises every dead thing it touches. Only one creature can walk down into her and come out again: Grik, the last Ragwing, the old one at the back of a goblin shelf on a river under the mountains, too old to climb his own steps. He names his price. He knows something about the Tarred that they don’t, and he isn’t telling. In the north, Gorruk the Awakened watches his raised orcs drift toward the living ones, while a thousand dead warriors of his tribe stand frozen in a mountain pass. And the elves’ oldest carving warns what happens when the Mother dies: Where she feeds, he harvests. ASH is the fourth book of The Long Harvest: grimdark war fantasy told from the side of the monsters. It is Grik’s last road, and a goblin’s end.