Starforged Oath

Kael Renn never asked to stand between a god and a battlefield. On the starforged front, priests carve bowls into the earth and call down power that can shatter armies, mend bones, or erase a village in a single breath. Someone has to watch those miracles, name what really happened, and sign off that the cost was "necessary." That someone is called a Witness. Kael thinks it's a miserable, mostly symbolic job—until the numbers stop adding up. The wrong people are dying, the "acceptable losses" always seem to be the same kind of towns, and the god behind the miracles is keeping a very selective ledger of who pays and who walks away clean. When a massacre is quietly written off as an accounting error, Kael does the one thing a Witness is never supposed to do: He refuses to sign. One unsigned miracle shouldn't matter. But suddenly reports are missing, orders are "misfiled," and the army's pet god starts looking at Kael like a problem entry that needs to be corrected. As the campaign grinds on and the losses mount, Kael finds himself drafted into a different kind of war—one fought in ledgers and loopholes as much as with steel and fire. To survive, he'll have to: Out-stubborn a god that thinks people are numbers. Argue theology in the middle of a spear line. Keep his found family—tired soldiers, one sharp-tongued mage, and a princess who's much too practical—alive long enough to matter. Decide how many lives he's willing to put on the page to change how the story is written. Every miracle has a price. Every war writes history in someone's blood. If Kael can't force the system to admit whose, the Starforge campaign will end the way all "necessary" wars do: with the dead tidied into footnotes and the guilty balancing their books on bones. STARFORGED CYCLE is book one of a character-driven epic fantasy series about stubborn people, broken systems, and the dangerous magic of saying, "No, that's not what happened. " Expect: Found-family banter in the middle of battles Miracles treated like weapons and contracts A god-accountant with terrible ethics Swordplay, trench mud, and the slow, furious beginning of a quiet revolt