Makerborn
Daymon Ashcord
(Maladies of Empire, #1)
Publication date: June 15th 2026
Genres: Adult, Dark Fantasy, Fantasy
The God War is over. An empire built on suffering, slavery, and betrayal remains…
In the fractured lands of the Salvian Empire, the Great Houses rule through blood and fear. For years, Alandra Phoenyka has hunted powerful Sonomancers in the empire’s name, paid in empty promises that her stolen daughter would be returned. Each step forward demands another compromise. Another betrayal. Another piece of herself lost.
When those promises turn to treachery, she is forced to take matters into her own hands and risk everything to reclaim her child.
In the empire’s mining camps, Bez Windstrider has endured years of torture and brutal experimentation. Broken but unyielding, he clings to one purpose: vengeance. The men who murdered his parents will pay, and their deaths will complete the ritual needed to free his parents ’souls from damnation.
But the deeper his grief cuts, the more he becomes something far more dangerous, for himself and for the empire.
As their paths draw closer, the buried truths of the God War begin to surface. What begins as two personal vendettas threatens to unravel something far greater than either of them can control.
Because empires do not fall quietly.
And the gods that shaped them are not as dead as they seem.
Makerborn is the first book in the Maladies of Empire series, a brutal epic dark fantasy of vengeance, sacrifice, and the cost of love.
For readers of dark, character-driven epic fantasy in the vein of Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence, R.F. Kuang, Evan Winter, and Steven Erikson.
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EXCERPT:
Chapter 2
A Son’s Vengeance
Bez woke in darkness, deep in a pit, having failed his parents yet again. The night air was heavy and damp. The acrid stench of feces had lessened, but his nose still burned with the stink of decay. He felt like he would never wash the smell from his body. What does it matter now?
The moist earth offered scant relief from the Southern Waste’s merciless heat. Sweat slicked his body. His skin felt on fire, reminding him of how the Salvians slowly roasted meat on spits. He pinched his right nostril and blew out a thick wad of phlegm.
How long? How squalling long have they left me down here to rot?
He traced fine grooves in the earthy wall of his cage with long, dirty fingernails. Twenty-seven days he’d scratched before he’d given up counting. Then the real fun began. Weeks of wading in his own shit like a rutting hog once the pit guards had stopped retrieving his privy bucket. Weeks more of starvation when the obvious solution to avoid living in a hog pen penetrated his addled mind: no food, no feces. His only companions were self-pity, nightmares, and maggots gorging on his noxious filth.
And the moans of indentured miners, likely years past their freedom date, and Collared All-Tribe—his people—drifting down in his dirt tomb.
“Water,” cried a pit prisoner.
“Bread, just a heel of bread for Seal’s sake,” whined another.
“It was Tuftson,” someone sniveled. “He made me do it. It was him. Please, let me out.”
“Shut your gobs!” bellowed a voice.
The sounds washed over him, had become part of him, familiar as his gnawing hunger or the ever-present worms wriggling against his hot skin. Even without starlight, his people’s blessed vision allowed him to penetrate the mirk. He watched his sunken stomach rise and fall. Each rib pressed against his skin. Sour spit filled his mouth.
He wasn’t surprised that an army of worms assaulted the sides of his stomach and shoulders while he dozed. The slimy little grubs coated him with a sticky sludge, but he was past caring. Hands trembling, he brushed the vanguard away that had reached his chest. His legs were a lost cause. Scores of grubs covered them so only his toes peeked out.
Bez yawned. Heat-induced spans of intermittent sleep kept him drowsy and muddled. Sometimes his parents sat beside him in the dirt, back from the dead, singing and laughing. Other times, he was in the mountains climbing crags, or swimming in crystalline lakes so clear he could see rocks at the bottom. Moments ago, he was a boy again, running barefoot with his cousins through Uncle Darian’s fields, the tall grass whipping at his legs. Then a cry from a prisoner or the damp air clogging his nose had awakened him, shattering the vision. What was real or imagined blurred. Maybe I’m with my uncle still and the pit is only a nightmare.
Hesitantly, he stretched his hands to either side, fingertips brushing the cool, root-tangled walls. Feet firmly pressed against damp earth. Not a nightmare. He moaned like a wounded animal.
“Guardian spirits above,” he wheezed, not wiping the hot tears streaking down his cheek. “There’s no way out.”
But that was a lie. There was a way. His fingers searched for the gouge in the wall, finding the sharp-edged shard of obsidian he’d hidden there. My final escape.
He pried it free, hand shaking, and pressed the jagged edge against the soft flesh of his right wrist. A bead of blood sprang from the tip.
“I’ll do it this time,” he said to the crude face carved into the wall. A pause. “I know that’s what I said last time. By the All-Spirit, I can’t—” His throat tightened. “I can’t take it anymore.”
“Enjoying your new home, demon-blood?” asked an unwelcome voice from the pit’s metal cage above.
“Dorota,” he rasped, tongue clumsy from disuse. “What a pleasure.”
He hated Yan’s henchwoman, but at that moment, his life in the balance, he clung to her words like a drowning man to driftwood.
Her chuckles echoed in the earthy tomb. “Liar. Play it friendly as you like, slit-eyes, but we both know what you are.” She crouched, damp hair plastered to her face, mouth hooked in a grin that never reached her eyes. “I saw the demon in you when we caught you on that ridge. Thought you were clever, didn’t you? Thought the aqueduct workers wouldn’t notice you and your two friends? What is the count? Your third?”
It was his fourth failed attempt to escape the Makersmetal mining camp, but he didn’t bother correcting the murdering bitch. I failed them just like my parents. Tala dead. Marcel beaten or worse. Anelia missing. And Bez… well, he would die in darkness, dooming his parents ’souls to wander the Shadowlands forever, never to reunite with their ancestors. He choked down a sob, not wanting to give her any satisfaction seeing him broken.
Author Bio:
Daymon Ashcord writes dark fantasy shaped by suffering, resilience, and the brutal edges of love pushed too far.
Born in Gdańsk, Poland, and raised in New York, he grew up on science fiction, fantasy, and the stories that linger long after the final page. After studying accounting and public policy, he left a conventional path to travel the world and create a documentary, turning storytelling into something essential.
His debut novel, Makerborn (2026), reflects years of persistence, personal setbacks, and a fascination with the darker truths people endure to survive.
He lives in North Carolina, hiking mountains by day and writing by night. He is considering adopting a dog, a cat, or both, and suspects they would judge him harshly.
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When King James Kronenscheld dies at the hands of the Demon King, he thinks his suffering is finally over and he can join his Edwin in Paradise. And, hey, at least he’d taken the Demon King with him, right?
AJ Sherwood believes in happily ever afters, magic, dragons, good men, and dark chocolate. She often dreams at night of delectable men doing sexy things with each other. In between writing multiple books (often at the same time) she pets her cats, plays with her dogs, and attempts insane things like aerial yoga. 
My existence was as cold as my birth. I was born with both knowledge and will—an inevitability for my kind. Drawn to the final moments of mortal life, we came into being. Some of us became Reapers, tasked solely with ferrying souls to their afterlife. Others craved the power of souls, calling themselves gods of Death—Shinigami. They believed that devouring or absorbing souls granted them greater might, but found that power only deepened their coldness and emptiness. Those gods of Death became husks, bored of their own immortality yet too frightened to end themselves. But being a Reaper can yield the same chill. Though I know the souls would be lost without our guidance, my own existence seems bound to a perpetual winter, drawn to the final beat of each mortal life.
