Emperor of the Borderlands Book 5 is OUT TODAY
Hrodric the Relentless was a varangian king and an archmage. He built an empire, led armies, wielded magic that shattered battlefields, and died with a blade in his heart.
Then he woke up on a gallows, in the body of a young nobleman named Prokhor with a noose around his neck.
The strange world he landed in is fractured into petty principalities where noble families play political games while monsters breed in the wastelands. Magic exists but technology stalled halfway. Standing stones connect cities through the Aethernet. Cars run on the streets but only the wealthy own them. Guns coexist with enchanted swords. City blocks glow with magical lighting while rural villages still burn torches.
Outside the walls roam the Soulless — mindless, hungry creatures that emerge from the wilderness in waves. The aristocracy treats them as a manageable nuisance and a source of valuable resources: kill them, harvest the magical crystals they leave behind, fuel your power. Prokhor looks at them and feels something cold settle in his gut — they are disturbingly similar to the horrors he spent a lifetime fighting in the world he came from. He knows what happens when these things stop being a nuisance and become a tide.
His death sentence gets commuted — not mercy, but murder dressed as clemency. A convenient way to dispose of a noble political prisoner without the embarrassment of a public execution. He's exiled to a dirt-poor village on the frontier and handed an impossible task: deliver a fortune in taxes within six months from people who have nothing. The last man sent to govern that village? He officially fell into a well. Unofficially, the villagers put him there when he tried to squeeze them for coin. The prince who sent him knows this. He's counting on the same outcome.
Prokhor carries two kinds of magic — an innate Talent, Weapon Transmutation, that lets him forge any weapon from raw material and bend it to his will, and elemental affinities in geomancy and metallomancy that give him dominion over stone and metal. And he carries something no one else in this world has: the knowledge and experience of a man who has already climbed to the peak of magical power once before. Rank by rank, he's doing it again — faster, sharper, skipping the dead ends that cost him decades the first time.
This isn't a teenage protagonist stumbling through moral dilemmas. Prokhor is a grown man, a seasoned ruler and a veteran of wars that would break most people. He doesn't agonize over doing what needs to be done. He doesn't lose sleep over necessary violence. But he's not a butcher either — he protects the people under his care, honors loyalty, and draws hard lines he won't cross. He kills when killing is needed, shows mercy when mercy is earned, and never confuses the two.
He gathers outcasts. Builds walls. Trains fighters. Starting from one village on the edge of nowhere, he's going to do what he did in his past life — unite the fractured lands under one banner and crush the Soulless using his creed: "Against absolute power, all cunning loses its meaning".
Emperor of the Borderlands — progression fantasy, kingdom building, and a protagonist who doesn't play games.
Cover art by amazing Ahn Sohee aka xxxsof.
All the released books are on Kindle Unlimited.
Two audiobooks are also out, along with German translations of the first three books.
US Amazon (KU+):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G2C5BKH3
Universal link:
https://mybook.to/borderlands5