The Lion: Speaker Origins, Book One

Young Jad the shepherd boy, in his first true act of magic, inadvertently initiates the collapse of an empire.

In the beginning, when the world is new, Jad the young shepherd stumbles upon his god, and his god is an idiot.

But before Jad can tell anyone, he and his friend, Tez, find a soldier from a faraway land in the river, bleeding from a sword strike. He tells the boys that soldiers are coming to take their village, and kill anyone who resists.

Jad’s father says they’ll fight. Their god will protect them. The soldier says many gods have been fed to the expanding empire’s terrible god eater, including his own. If only, he says, the village had a Speaker of magic—who Jad’s father would deem a terrible heretic—only then might they be able to save their village.

And the soldier is looking directly at Jad.

The Speaker Timeline Books 

A handful of names were scribbled in the Book when the Speaker known as the Shepherd finally found it, some of them hardly recognizable as language. After the world was written, the book contained a list of the created, and when the Shepherd scrawled his name at the bottom his name was taken from him, part of the book now, and he, like the other names before him, became part of the everlasting story of creation.

As magic slowly seeps out of the world, the Speaker Timeline follows the Shepherd, from his mountain village in a land now folded into history, down through the ages. Young Jad the shepherd boy, in his first true act of speaking, inadvertently initiates the collapse of an empire. The dust rises again, the dust falls, and the shepherd carries on. Some speakers spend a lifetime learning how to properly Speak some small piece of the world, but the Shepherd, for good or ill, has all of time.