The Velvet Kingdom (Return of the Demon-King Book 1)

He ruled as the Demon-King of a vanished empire — until his own inner circle turned on him. Poisoned. Buried alive. Forgotten. A thousand years later, Mellak wakes in the dark, starving, blind, and powerless, in a world that has crumbled into fractured, frightened kingdoms clinging to whatever scraps of magic survived the Sundering — the very cataclysm the world now blames on him. To reclaim anything of what he was, he'll have to claw his way back from absolute zero: feeding on whatever essence he can take, one desperate act at a time, while evading a Church that wants him erased and enemies who have no idea what they're actually afraid of. Along the way he gathers the unlikeliest of allies — a disgraced priest haunted by visions that keep coming true, a sharp-tongued thief with more heart than sense, and an old, treacherous demon who remembers exactly what Mellak used to be. But something out there has already recognized him for what he truly is. And some debts don't stay buried. The Velvet Kingdom is Book One of The Return of the Demon-King — a dark epic fantasy about power, patience, and the cost of being underestimated twice.