Pre-order Now. Releases September 29.
Burden of
Choice
The King Threw Away His Champion.
One Broken Soldier. One New World.
Burden of
Fate
Start the Series. Free on Kindle Unlimited.
Ashes of Vaeltharion, Book Two
Burden of
Mastery
Out Now. The Dominion Awaits.
Pre-order Now. Releases September 29.
Ashes of Vaeltharion, Book Three
Burden of Choice
The System made Trace Veeran a weapon. It never asked what he'd do with it.
He comes down out of the mountains harder than he went up. Poison doesn't touch him. Corruption slides off him. And the people who run this world are starting to notice.
His crew is waiting: a healer, a shield, a boy with quick hands, an archer who won't explain his name. There's a war coming down the road, and it isn't raiders this time. The Dominion is marching. The crown has a golden champion painted up to meet it.
Trace isn't the champion. He's the one they threw away. Someone paid a crown's ransom to put him in the ground, and the real fight isn't the army at the wall. It's what he's willing to carry, and what it costs to be the last thing standing between his people and the dark.
“Trace isn't the champion. He's the one they threw away.”
Start the Series. New Cover Art.
Ashes of Vaeltharion, Book One
Burden of Fate
A soldier nobody asked for. A kingdom that regrets summoning him. A fate he never agreed to carry.
Trace Veeran had already lost enough. The Army. His team. Most of himself. Then another world pulled him through a marble circle and told him he was its champion. The System handed him a level, a spear, and immunity to every poison it could name. It also took away the one thing he had been using to keep the past quiet.
Sober for the first time in years and in no shape to be anyone's hero, Trace was exactly what the king had not asked for. So the court threw him out. He walked into a land of dungeons and Dominion armies with a clearance-bin spear and a teacher who charges for everything.
Every level has to be earned. Every scar comes with a lesson. The question is not whether Trace can survive the burden of fate. It is what part of him will still be standing when he does.
Free to read on Kindle Unlimited. Narrated by Kenneth Fuentes on Audible.
New cover art by Skybrush Workshop. Books Two and Three get their new covers this fall.
About the Author
Steve Harthun
Steve Harthun writes gritty LitRPG and, starting this winter, sci-fi thrillers. In both, nobody gets handed anything.
Ashes of Vaeltharion, his five-book progression fantasy series about a sober Army Ranger, a spear with a history, and a kingdom that regrets summoning him, began on Royal Road and now lives on Kindle Unlimited, with audiobooks narrated by Kenneth Fuentes. The Infinite Protocol, a reincarnation thriller, begins this winter.
He manages IT by day, tracks XP in spreadsheets by night, and lives in Kentucky with his wife, Susan, and a family large enough to have named half the cast.