Aldren Quist was never meant to be a villain—he was meant to be a wizard. Polite, dutiful, shackled to rules and rituals. But one day, he quit. In the silence that followed, he discovered necromancy: the raw, unfiltered truth buried in bone. From a plague pit of corpses he built a kingdom of the dead, a court of witnesses who could not be bribed, and an empire of honesty the living feared to face.
As his power grew, so did his hunger. Kings bent, priests trembled, and the world whispered his name as its greatest evil. Yet in the midst of his dominion, one of his own creations—a zombie called Gate—began to learn. To listen. To choose. And in that choice, destiny twisted. For prophecy does not always crown heroes; sometimes it grows out of ruin.
When Gate ascends and anoints a Chosen One to lead the living against him, Aldren is forced to face the one truth he never dared: that even the dead can defy him.
Dark, lyrical, and unsettling, The Last Honest Profession is a tale of power, rebellion, and the thin line between justice and tyranny. Readers will be drawn into its ancient cadence and left with the haunting question: what happens when the monster you built becomes the hope you cannot destroy?
