From the Editor

A kingdom divides when a king becomes a shepherd.

In this second installment of the Songs of Redemption series, it tells the story of His Majesty Tristan Aurelio Cassian Valmor.

Tristan’s Reckoning is dedicated to those who wonder if the title they bear has begun to outweigh the name the Father speaks over them.

As the only son of Gershan’s king and queen, Tristan is destined to inherit the throne. But an apprenticeship at the ancient and slightly mystical High Keep in Doreth begins to undercut everything he thinks he understands about duty. Assigned not to the warriors’ guild, but to the sheepfold, Tristan believes such training is a waste of his time. After all, what does being king have to do with keeping the smelly ofinja that dot the hillside?

Yet as the story unfolds and Tristan grows, he finds himself forged in fires he cannot control. Again and again, he must practice patience, stewardship, gentleness, and fortitude, the very virtues he learned while watching sheep and keeping wolves at bay.

From the mountains of Doreth to the Academy at Nobelgrae, from the Strait of Gilbraith to the white-walled palace of Caerdis, this epic fantasy is more than a coming-of-age story. It is an exploration of what it means to be a man who remains steadfast when wolves come hunting the shepherd.

Why I Chose to Write Tristan’s Reckoning

Let’s face it, grounded masculine virtue often gets the short end of the stick in fiction. Men are too often written as impossible macho heroes with a dark streak or bumbling sitcom fathers who cannot lead anything, much less themselves. There rarely seems to be room for the much-needed middle ground, the hero who carries competence and capability, then spends himself on behalf of his family.

There are men in every genre who hold that silhouette, but most of them sacrifice themselves on the altar of the nation or the community. Very few are written where ordinary faithfulness carries the danger. Very few are tested not only by war, but by the pressure to remain gentle, steadfast, and obedient when compromise would be easier.

Write the book you want to read, they say. So I did.

I wrote the one about a man who loves Yah-Roi, who regularly prays, and who lives the life he has been given within the context his Shepherd has provided. There is tension. There is pressure. There is loss. But the pressure does not come because Tristan wants power. It comes because he refuses to play the manipulative games of his enemies.

Tristan does not get every decision right, and even when he does the right thing, it often costs him deeply. But that is biblical. Jesus told His followers that in this world they would have trouble. The promise was never a life without pressure. The promise was that He had overcome the world.

It is my hope to give readers, especially male readers, a hero they can identify with, even if they do not hold a crown in the real world. It is my prayer that every reader would take this truth from Tristan’s story.

When life tries to rip everything away, you are still what the Father called you before the foundation of the world.

I’ll leave you with a quote from the book.

“The crown remained in Caerdis. But the shepherd had come home.”

His crown demands everything. Even what should never be sacrificed.He was raised to become king.
Not to love.

Tristan has spent his life mastering control—of his kingdom, his future, and himself. But when he binds himself in secret to a foreign maid, he sets in motion a chain of events that threatens everything he was born to protect.

Exiled through betrayal and hunted at sea, Tristan is stripped of title, power, and position—forced to survive as nothing more than a captain under another man’s command. And when the truth of the woman he loves is finally revealed, it is far worse than he imagined.

Because Alana is not who he thought she was.

And the enemies circling his crown have been waiting for this weakness.

When war comes and his kingdom begins to fracture, Tristan fights his way back to reclaim what is his. But victory comes at a cost he cannot ignore.

His crown—or his family.

And this time, he may not be able to keep both.

Tristan’s Reckoning is a story of power, betrayal, and the cost of choosing what truly matters - When who you were trained to be collides with who you were created to be.