Hadrian Marlowe started down a path that could only end in fire. The galaxy remembers him as a hero who burned every alien Cielcin from the sky, and a monster who destroyed a sun, annihilating four billion human lives against Imperial orders. But Hadrian was not a hero, monster, or soldier. Fleeing his father and a future as a torturer, he becomes stranded on a strange world. Forced to fight as a gladiator and into the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, he fights a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.
Hadrian Marlowe started down a path that could only end in fire. The galaxy remembers him as a hero who burned every alien Cielcin from the sky, and a monster who destroyed a sun, annihilating four billion human lives against Imperial orders. But Hadrian was not a hero, monster, or soldier. Fleeing his father and a future as a torturer, he becomes stranded on a strange world. Forced to fight as a gladiator and into the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, he fights a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.