The Winged Champion

Book excerpt: Enjoying life as a retired pirate, William has no interest in chasing adventure. He’s lived two lives already and earned some rest. But he can’t ignore the call of family needing help, so he drags his partners along into the growing chaos of Arcini. Only he has the ability to prevent the monarchy’s downfall. But the cost of finding the truth might be too much, even for an immortal champion. Jonathan’s career as the ‘Angel of Death’, the ‘Winged Avenger’, is over. No one has any use for a pirate commander with no crew to command, so he settles for the predictability of the mundane instead. There’s little excitement, but there are also far fewer knife wounds. At least the trip to the Arcinian palace will be a diversion from the boredom of retirement. When he’s offered the command of a ragtag brigade of new militia recruits, though, he realizes that his skills as a warrior aren’t as obsolete as he’d thought. He only hopes that his feisty crew of Enuldesh soldiers can learn to follow the orders of an Annali pirate. With a gourmet kitchen, a bountiful garden, and unlimited freedom, Jai has everything he wants in the life he shares with his partners. He can cook to his heart’s content and no longer has to worry about battles and the fickle whims of the sea. He even takes the visit to the palace in stride, confident in his familiarity of the place where he’d spent much of his life. Thrown back into palace routines and prejudices, however, it’s apparent that he hasn’t quite escaped his past life. The more things change, the more they stay the same, and ghosts that he thought he’d laid to rest keep popping up to haunt him. Three powerful immortals with all of eternity on their hands now find themselves racing against time and staring down death to preserve what they love and care about. If they can’t stand against the unstoppable forces of fate, then everything they know will be gone. Their legacy will be one of failure and destruction. And they alone will remain to face the consequences. This work is intended for a mature audience and contains mature content. For a more comprehensive list of content tags, please see this book’s information page at the author’s website. Keywords: mm romance, sword sorcery magic quest, alternate universe AU, knight romance, royal romance, mm fantasy romance, gay fantasy romance