Epitaph Proven

"A full-bodied cast and enjoyably dense plot elevate this fantasy tale." — Kirkus Reviews (standard ed.)

In an unrecorded era, a bastion of humanity sought the primordial guardians of a calamitous energy of unknown origin and purpose. In the crux of a great war, the actions of one warmonger caused a worldwide outbreak, transforming friend and foe alike into undying entities driven mad with human desire. That warmonger, wrought with guilt, painted a faceless woman before disappearing from the world.

That warmonger would be worshipped by some as the "Begetter," a god who had ushered the era of the tainted ones. Several millennia following the beginning of the Scourge, one tainted sought to reunite with his so-called creator and founded the Elegies, a group of like-minded tainted including Enlenea, the faceless painting granted life by the Scourge. But Enlenea empathised with the plight of a human woman, and that woman would gift Enlenea with what she secretly desired-humanity and the power to forge her own life, at the cost of suffering a broken world.

A thousand years later, Lyaphend Farwalth is born in Golem, an advanced nation among many scattered in the forlorn lands. Possessing the power of a tainted, the will of a human, and a glaive exalted by the former guardians of the Scourge, Lyaphend must reclaim her memories as Enlenea to decide her fate in a world with both mortal and otherworldly beings seeking to use her for their purposes.

But with her nation at the cusp of political upheaval and a terrifying nemesis from her past life waiting in the shadows, she may well be fated to suffer an unforgiving life-provided she can suppress the dormant mad spirit within her and avoid becoming her own greatest enemy.

In this rerelease of Foedus et Monstrum, the grim underworld of Golem is further explored in the 14,000-word special chapter, "The Worrier and the Warrioress!"