DREADMARK: Book I - The Wolf, The Eagle and the God in the Mountain (DREADMARK Saga 1)

As the Roman Empire completes its brutal conquest of Dacia, the old world dies screaming beneath iron and fire.King Decebalus, the last defiant wolf of a fallen kingdom, watches his capital burn and chooses exile over humiliation. With his final loyal warriors—the “last wolves of Dacia”—he flees into the Carpathians, hunted relentlessly by Roman forces led by the ambitious Tribune Lucius Marius Varro. One by one, the wolves fall in savage, heroic stands, until Decebalus himself is cornered. Refusing to grant Rome the satisfaction of his capture, he takes his own life, sealing his legacy in blood. His severed head is delivered to Emperor Trajan as a trophy of conquest.Unbeknownst to Rome, Decebalus’s daughter Andrada has already begun a far darker journey.Captured among the surviving Dacians, Andrada enters the ancient Cave of Mirrors, a sacred sanctuary carved into the Carpathians. There, she bargains with the elder god Zalmoxis, awakening as the first Moroi—a being of conditional immortality bound to blood, shadow, and eternal servitude. Dacia is not saved; it is sacrificed. Rome, Zalmoxis promises, will bleed for centuries.Taken in chains under the false name Amalusta, Andrada infiltrates the Roman slave caravan bound for Rome. In the darkness before dawn, she feeds for the first time, leaving no trace but ash. She creates her first progeny—Ziais, a grieving mother, and Baran, a hardened farmer—while others are reduced to nothing. Thus the Dreadmark is born.As the caravan moves through the mountains, Roman order collapses under terror and suspicion. Prisoners vanish. A child is taken hostage. Varro grows convinced that Amalusta is the common thread tying every horror together, yet cannot prove it.Then the past rises from the dead.A savage Dacian tribe, the Teurisci, led by the faceless warlord Zburătoru Viron, ambushes the caravan wearing the armor—and the flayed faces—of fallen Roman soldiers. Chaos erupts. Prison carts are smashed. Slaves flee. Roman blood floods the soil.Amid the carnage, Ziais chooses her living daughter over her immortal Maker, invoking the sun-defying Night’s Embrace and vanishing into the woods. Her choice costs everything. To make an example for all who watch from the forest, Rome murders the child in full view of kin and captors alike.The screams echo through blood and shadow.By episode’s end, Andrada kneels in agony, her last tie to her former humanity severed. Ziais is lost. Rome marches on. Varro survives, bloodied and rising in favor. Trajan prepares spectacles of domination foRome did not merely conquer Dacia.It emptied it.Cities were burned to bone. Kings were reduced to trophies. Survivors were chained and counted like livestock. The mountains watched—and remembered.In the wake of annihilation, something ancient stirs beneath the Carpathians. Not a savior. Not a rebellion. A hunger older than empire, awakened by betrayal and fed by blood.DREADMARK: Book I — The Wolf, The Eagle & the God in the Mountain is a savage historical fantasy where gods do not rescue the faithful, where conquest breeds monsters, and where vengeance is not declared—it is grown.Rome believes the war is over.It has only changed shape. Read more