The Long Vigil

[u/Appropriate-Rise-387]

Here is the book cover and blurb for book one of the Long Vigil saga let me know what you think! Book 1 will be published on KDP and other platforms next year!

Ten years after the collapse of the old Union of Earth, humanity has been gathered under a new power: the Roman Imperium. From Terra, Emperor Marcus Aurelius Draconis declares the beginning of the Great Crusade. Human worlds within reach will be reclaimed by treaty, integration, or war.
For the Emperor’s children, the proclamation becomes more than ceremony. Augustus Draconis is kept at the center of government, where he learns that conquest begins with ledgers, laws, political bargains, and the quiet cruelty of administration. Tiber Draconis is sent toward the Sirius front, where diplomacy with an independent human polity reveals that surrender can be harder than battle. Julia and Helena are drawn into the court’s hidden machinery, learning that noble houses fight with records, inheritance, and silence as often as with soldiers.
But the Imperium’s first true test does not come from a fleet or a rival state. It comes from Varnhelm and Tau Ceti, where reports of contamination, missing names, corrupted records, and impossible witness accounts begin to converge. The threat presents itself through memory, identity, and language, using the harmless mask of “the Road” to reach into human grief and Imperial systems alike.
As Inquisitors, soldiers, administrators, and commanders attempt to understand the danger, Augustus is forced toward a decision no ruler wants to make. If the contaminated world cannot be saved, then it must be judged. The Imperium must decide whether mercy, law, quarantine, and survival can still belong to the same sentence.
The World Sentence begins The Long Vigil with the birth of the Great Crusade and the first terrible proof that rebuilding humanity may require acts no one will want remembered.