GRIM DARK NOVICE: A LitRPG Fantasy (The Grim Dark Ascension)

The boy is fourteen on the shortest day of the year, and his father comes to dinner for the first time in a month. His father reads the report card. Top mark in Arcana. He sets the card down and says four words. Real man material. That night, his father walks out the front door and is never seen again. His mother is the only sanctioned necromancer in three generations. She makes the cheerful blue mail-carrying birds the capital adores. Three weeks after his father vanishes, she is killed by something that climbed out of the deep tunnels. The boy finds her on the workshop floor with hardened amber sealing a chute and her hands stained the same color. The official report blames field-twisted vermin. Days after the funeral, the boy unlocks his father's workshop alone, picks up the jeweler's loupe headset on the bench, and puts it on. A system interface comes online for the first time in continental history. He thinks the word Crown. The headset weighs on his head like one. His father is dead. A crown is what kings wear when their fathers are dead. By spring he is digging up Old Ben Kenob, the cobbler who called him young master. Three centuries later, the Crown is still on his head.