Amal and the Shapeshifters (The Halls of the Shadow King)

Amal and the Shapeshifters A Novelette set in the world of The Halls of the Shadow King In the third century, when Rome's reach ended and Persia's began, three men rode east toward something that had learned to wear human faces. Amal could see through them—barely. That was the problem. Long before Amal became the Shadow King's agent in Rome, he was still learning to trust the gift that let him see the Pattern—the threads of faith and love connecting one believer to another. When those threads start turning wrong in a Persian village near the border, his mentors Bazir and Tenjri take him east to find out why. What they find isn't corruption or persecution. It's something older, patient, and hungry—a thing that doesn't destroy the people it feeds on. It replaces them. Amal has power he doesn't fully understand yet, teachers who won't simply hand him answers, and a village running out of time. What he learns in that house at the edge of the Persian border—about the difference between reaching for his gift and letting it work through him—becomes part of who he is by the time his real mission begins. Amal and the Shapeshifters is a standalone novelette set in the world of The Halls of the Shadow King, following the same young man readers meet at the start of The Apprentice—before Rome, before the Shadow King's network, when he was still finding out what he was capable of. Fans of Stephen Lawhead's Celtic fantasy tales will feel at home in this world of ancient faith, real spiritual danger, and courage that costs something.