Serpent's Cradle (Lands of Ophir, #1)

"Keep your distance. I am drenched in filth and the slaughter's gore."

Darian is a man fracturing—brittle with exhaustion, stained by a violence that refuses to wash away. He wanders a world where the sun is but a fading memory, and the shadows have begun to mock his labours. He is driven by a singular, desperate ghost: Elika—the light he pursues through the rot, the beloved face that haunts his silence, and the only reason he refuses to fall.

But the road to her is laid in old malice and old...