The Weight of the Crown: A Soul Traded for a Beautiful Lie (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798233086045)

"Sometimes, God doesn't have to be real. He just has to be mad."

The world did not die in the fire of battle. It vanished in silence, swallowed by the Umbra-a grey, suffocating darkness that erased the borders of history. Adrian von Marcas is a living tomb. Once the great "Lion of the West," he is now nothing but a mountain of rusted iron and decaying flesh. Beneath his armor hides not a hero, but a functional psychopath whose mind fractured under the weight of a terrible mistake made at the Black Gates.

To survive, he rejected reality. Adrian lives inside his own hallucination, marching in step with the "Golden Legion"-ten thousand ghosts he betrayed and left to die.

But to the boy he snatched from the jaws of death, Adrian is a Savior. Elias looks at the broken commander and sees a God. He prays to the "Golden Eye" burning in the General's socket, unaware of the terrifying truth. This light is not divine grace. It is the terminal stage of Shadow-rot, devouring Adrian's sanity with every step.

Adrian knows: the truth will kill them both. So he chooses the agony of the lie. He burns the remnants of his humanity to sustain a myth where the sun still shines.

This is the story of a monster who loved a child enough to become a legend...