Jacob Peppers

The hardest war is the one a man fights alone. One hundred years ago, the Eternals, thirteen men and women of immense power, closer, many believed, to gods than mortals, stood against the greatest threat the world had ever faced. And they lost. They died. All save for one, known as the Youngest...

Death comes to Celes. It marches with an army of thousands, an army that comes not to conquer but to destroy. Not to save but to kill. Monsters roam the shadowy alleyways of the city searching for those they might devour, and corrupt guardsmen wield their blades against those they are meant to...

The wages of a soldier are pain and regret his reward. Soldier himself had told the wanderer that. Old words from another life but true words nonetheless. The wanderer knew this, for he still carried the scars such pain had brought, and a life spent on the run left a man little else but his...

The world needed heroes.... It got them instead. A swordsman past his prime who has vowed to never wield a blade again. A mage who'd rather throw fists than fireballs and thinks magic is for sissies. An assassin who grows sick at the sight of blood. And a man with a pet squirrel he believes to...

Assassins are bad. Angry gods are worse. All that plus cults and demons? In the hero business, they call that Monday. The worst thing about a man being led to his execution—aside from the whole impending death bit—was that he immediately tried to figure out what choice had brought him there...

War sweeps the land as the sons and daughters of the late King Marcus battle over who will claim their father’s throne and able-bodied men and women flock to one cause or the other in the hopes of a better tomorrow. At least, most of them. If life has taught the jaded sellsword Aaron Envelar...

Dannen Ateran spent the week following his battle with the necromancer and his undead army doing exactly what he enjoyed most—nothing. Certainly nothing heroic. At least nothing more heroic than lying in Claire's bed and reveling in the feeling of having no one try to kill him. At least, that...

Hero checklist for a long and happy life: Step one: Don’t be a hero. Step two: If by some horrible miscalculation, a man finds himself a hero, then he should not, under any circumstances, accept a “quest”. Particularly one including magical rings, swords in stones, or any talk of “chosen...

Aaron Envelar thought a sellsword's life was as dangerous as any life could be. He was wrong. Trapped in a conquered city with a reward on their heads, Aaron and his companions must find a way to elude the soldiers pursuing them while he struggles to understand his bond with Co, a magical...

The battle is won. But the war is just beginning. Belgarin’s forces have retreated, but in the city of Perennia there is no rejoicing. The air is filled with the mourning cries of survivors, and the wind that blows through the city carries the smell of freshly dug graves and death. As the...

The Downs, the poor district of the city of Avarest, is home to cutthroats and thieves, pickpockets and prostitutes, all of whom pay tribute to one of two powerful crime bosses. It is also home to Aaron Envelar, a disillusioned sellsword known as the Silent Blade, who cares nothing for the...

The path to peace is paved in blood. Or so Cutter tells himself during the long nights as he travels deeper into the Black Wood, wrestling with his inner demons and battling those creatures which emerge from the shadows seeking his life. Meanwhile, in New Daltenia a violent organization thought...

I am fire and all I touch turns to ash. Despite the odds, Cutter and his companions managed to bring Matt to the capital, where he was crowned king. But instead of getting better, things have only gotten worse. The Known Lands and its people stand at a precipice. One false move, one mistake, and...

When a man goes out seeking blood, he will find it. Always he will find it. It was a truth Cutter had learned long ago, for he had been that man. For countless years, on countless battlefields, he had sought violence and blood...and the gods help him, he had found it. Found more than his share...

When a man's hope is stripped from him, vengeance is all he has left. They are gone. Dekker and Elizabeth, Clint and Sarah, and all the rest. Captured or worse. It took the wanderer a hundred years to find them, his friends. His family. And now they are gone. Taken. Taken by traitors who have...

Some nights are darker than others. Some shadows are not shadows at all but Death, watching, waiting. Only sometimes, Death is not content to watch. Sometimes, he comes with purpose. And tonight, on this darkest of all nights, Death came not for the wanderer, as it had so many times, but for his...

The truest stories are written in blood. The wanderer knows this, for over the last century, he has lived those stories, has seen them scrawled in his blood or the blood of others. Others like those dead Perishables scattered about the noble's courtyard, like those servants of the enemy, mortal...

Death has a voice. The wanderer knew that, for he had heard that voice often enough. And as he walked through the village of Alhs, past the corpses of those who had chosen to stay, he heard it again. He heard it in the rasp of the wind along the eaves of the abandoned homes he passed, heard it...

A warrior's path is trodden in pain and death lies at its end. Those were his father's words from long ago. Not just words, in truth, but a warning. Despite this, in the end, Cutter, like so many others, had chosen pain, had chosen death. Maybe he had done so when he lay dying in some back alley...

Where he walks, death follows. He was once known as Prince Bernard, ruler of his people and the man who led them in the Fey War against creatures out of myth and legend, beings out of nightmare. A man renowned for his strength, a man feared by his own people as much as his enemies. But there are...