Hero stories are built backwards.

James Wren is a junior wizard with more loyalty than experience when Sarah Ives, the Citadel’s young Loremaster, sends him west on an impossible mission: find Drake Ashwell, a bitter prison guard with a buried history in the last war. Sarah will not tell James why it has to be him. Only that villages are falling, the dead are rising, and the Citadel may have days before history returns for what it left unfinished.

Drake wants nothing to do with heroes, wars, or the legend of Sullivan, the man said to have saved the world from the dead. He has spent years guarding The Cage, a prison at the edge of the sea, keeping his head down and his past locked away. But Drake knows what heroic stories leave out: grief, blood, and magic that never works without taking something back.

Inside the Citadel, Sarah is trapped in a government that still functions, which may be worse than ruin. The undead commander occupying the city does not rule through chaos. He repurposes bodies and makes obedience practical. To stop him, James, Sarah, and Drake must follow the scars left by the last war before the dead turn the living world into something orderly, useful, and empty.

They say never meet your heroes. Especially when the legend is a lie.

Perfect for readers of Sara A. Mueller’s The Bone Orchard and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s City of Last Chances, After the Scar is an adult dark fantasy of necromantic horror, broken myths, and the terrible cost of being useful.