The Weight of Ash

Tarik-dar’s hands used to perform miracles. Now they traffic in agony.

In a kingdom where inherited pain is the only magic left—and the only currency that matters—the Ascendancy holds power by bleeding it from the desperate and hoarding it in the vaults. Tarik-dar once held prestige as a high-society healer, until the night he looked at the corrupt warlord bleeding out on his table, calculated the cost, and simply chose not to close the wound.

Stripped of his rank and indentured for his crime, Tarik is thrown into the grim, reeking workshops of Master Sorosh-ran, the kingdom’s most brilliant and venomous extractor of suffering. To survive, Tarik must learn to carve raw agony from the veins of the broken, refine it into power, and weaponize it without detonating himself.

He isn't fighting to redeem his soul. He’s fighting to tear out the foundation of the very system he once served—one vial, one stolen extraction hook, and one dead enforcer at a time.