Saga of the Stone King · Book One
An Oath Sworn
They wanted a weapon. They forgot to forge out his will.
The dark fantasy debut from M.T. Kadisin. A clanless dwarf volunteers for an experiment that turns him into something he cannot recognize. A story about identity, obedience, and what survives when everything else has been taken.
Genre
Dark Fantasy
Series
Book 1 of 5
Formats
Paperback, eBook
Publisher
The Kraken Tree
Synopsis
A nobody, a Poster, and the fire that came after.
Grady kept ledgers in the bottom drawer of an empire that had forgotten he existed. Clanless. Forgettable. Counted by no one. He spent his days tallying numbers for officials whose names he would never learn, in a city that was once the proudest fortress of his people.
Then a Poster appeared on the wall outside his office. Three lines, gold ink, signed by Keyrdegen Salzum. It promised something Grady had stopped believing existed: a use for him. He answered it. He did not know what he was answering.
What Salzum and his commission wanted was not a hero. They wanted a weapon. Obedient. Unthinking. Unbreakable. And for a while, the experiment held. Grady was reforged into something the underhalls had never seen, sent to do the work the official armies could not be seen doing.
The one thing they could not forge out of him was his will.
The World
Rockhome and the Deep.
The story unfolds in Rockhome, the great mountain city of the dwarves, and the long dark of the Deep Roads beneath it. Old clans hold the surface. Older things hold the under. What lives between them is the work this book is interested in.
Rockhome
A fortress city built into the bones of a mountain. Once the heart of dwarven power, now a place where bureaucracy outranks honor and the old halls have been carved into office space.
The Deep Roads
The tunnel network beneath Rockhome. Trade once moved through them. Now most are sealed, most are abandoned, and most have things in them that the official maps no longer name.
The Hadesi
The order from which Salzum drew his commission. They keep the ledgers no one is meant to read, fund the experiments no one is meant to know about, and answer to powers that have not been seen in centuries.
Characters
The ones who matter most.
Grady
The reluctant weapon
A clanless dwarf, written off by everyone, including himself. Volunteers for Salzum\u2019s experiment because the alternative is another decade of being forgotten. The experiment works. The man at the other end of it is the question the rest of the book is built around.
Keyrdegen Salzum
The architect
A Hadesi-funded experimentalist who believes the right pressure, the right pain, and the right oath can be used to manufacture a soldier. He is not a villain in the sense of being wrong about the world. He is a villain in the sense of being right about it, and acting accordingly.
Themes
What the story is really about.
An Oath Sworn is a book about what happens when the people in charge decide a man is more useful as a tool than as a person, and what happens when the tool refuses the job. It sits with questions of obedience, the cost of purpose, the difference between an order and a vow, and whether will is a thing a person owns or a thing a person earns by holding on to it long enough.
Choose Your Format
Three ways to bring it home.
Signed by the author
Paperback
$18.99
A physical copy of Book One, signed in person by M.T. Kadisin with a custom message. Hand-shipped from the Hudson Valley within five business days.
Questions about this format?Instant delivery
Digital Edition (ePub)
$6.99
Delivered through BookFunnel within minutes. Compatible with Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, Nook, and any standard ePub reader.
Questions about this format?Limited art print
Stone King Art Print
$24.99
A 12 by 18 inch print of the original cover art by The Kraken Tree, on archival matte stock. Ships within five to seven business days.
Questions about this format?FAQ
Questions readers ask.
What is An Oath Sworn about?
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Who is M.T. Kadisin?
From the Author
A note from M.T. Kadisin.
“I wrote An Oath Sworn for the people who picked up a fantasy novel hoping to find something solid in it. Something that felt like the weight of stone. Grady is mine, but he is also yours. Welcome to Rockhome. Stay as long as you can.”
M.T. Kadisin
Read the full bio