Guardians of Peace

Michael J. Barnes

*They don't make them like this anymore.* *Not really. Somewhere between the reboots and the "expanded universes," most genre fiction stopped trying to build a mythology from scratch and started curating one instead. Quest for the Star isn't curated. It's built — a thousand-year empire, a shattered relic, a prince convinced strength alone should be enough to claim it, and a prophecy that suggests it never was.* *This isn't a tie-in. It isn't fan fiction with the names filed off. It's an original mythic space opera built the hard way, one character-driven chapter at a time — and Chapter One is nine pages to find out whether it's the series you've been missing.* *"Before the Empire, there was only Atlantium, and Atlantium was a hundred crowns armed each against the others..."* *— The Gospel of Margus, Second Testament* Five thousand years after the Holy Star was shattered into five shards, one shard has surfaced — and Guar, the Blood Prince of Cori'a, will burn a monastery to the ground to claim it. Guar is a warrior bred for war his ancestors never stopped fighting — two heads taller than his own soldiers, armor the Empire has never pierced, eyes that glow like embers until provoked. He believes the Sword of Fire, Callaeous, is the only thing that can free Cori'a from a thousand-year peace built on fear instead of victory. What he doesn't yet know is that prophecy asks a harder question than strength ever could — whether he is *worthy*, not whether he is powerful — and that the fire he's hunting may have already chosen someone else. ## **CHAPTER ONE: The Blood Prince and the Sword of Fire** **What to expect in this chapter:** - A complete, tense first movement in the saga — traps, a hidden vault, a father-and-son reckoning — that ends on a genuine turn, not a full resolution - Mythic, scripture-inflected worldbuilding in the vein of Dune and Warhammer 40K, with the character-driven intimacy readers of Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere look for - The introduction of Denl'o — the Blood Prince's most trusted spy, and the character this saga is quietly building toward betraying him