City of Warriors (Legends of the Arakan)

In the skeleton of an ancient civilization, the Oracles of Mycedaria burned alive in their own sanctum. Once the guiding power behind the most powerful men and women throughout history, they upheld peace for over three hundred years. Their foresight ended wars before they could kindle, stonewalled assassinations, and divined the future of all who sought them out. Yet, in their exodus, one question stands above all others: how did their own deaths go unforeseen?
Their blindness to the future plunged countless lives into depravity, and threw Mycedaria into turmoil. Kings fell. The great Arakan died in his bedchamber with a blade still warm in his chest, and a shadow once thought banished re-emerged, threatening to expose the lies and secrets that keep such fragile peace alive.
*
Twenty years later, far from the High Kingdom of Themelios, Adonis, son to a lowborn farmer, reaches the age of manhood in a nation forged by warriors. Blood stains Polemistes’s past, and the Arena, which stands as the kingdom’s beating heart, hides just as many secrets beneath its sands. Adonis refuses the shape the world has cast for him, driven by his ambition to become the first Xeros chosen in over thirty years. To earn it, he must survive the Trials of Arete, a brutal contest where nobles born of the titan bloodline hold power above all others.
With his closest friends, Bodhi and Eoinë, Adonis steps onto a path that could lift his family from the outskirts forever. But as the trials unfold, forgotten truths surface. Ancient constructs, long dismissed as legend, stir awake. And the line between myth and reality fragments until Adonis can no longer distinguish what truths he has left to believe in.
What begins as a struggle to rise above his status transforms into something far larger: a clash of history, tangled prophecy, and lost powers that threaten a second exodus. One that may decide whether the Five Kingdoms survive at all.