The Hollow King

The Hollow King by John French, published in 2022, brought the author's talent for haunted, interior protagonists, honed on Ahriman and the Horus Heresy, to the Mortal Realms. Its subject is Cado Ezechiar, a Soulblight vampire and the last king of a realm that no longer exists, betrayed from within and burned by the servants of Chaos. What survived of his court survives only in him: Cado carries the souls of his dead household bound within his own being, voices he can commune with and powers he can draw on, each use spending a little more of the people he failed to save. The title is literal: he is a king whose kingdom is now hollow spaces inside himself.

The novel follows Cado's patient, corrosive hunt for the architects of that betrayal, a trail that leads him into a living city where cults coil beneath the surface of ordinary life. French writes it less as a war story than as occult detective fiction: false identities, whispered bargains, an investigation through streets where the monster doing the investigating must also feed. The tension between what Cado was, what he is, and what vengeance is turning him into gives the book its charge: he is a creature of Nagash's aristocracy of the dead who still remembers, painfully, what it was to be a protector.

The Hollow King matters as proof of how much room Age of Sigmar has for smaller, darker stories. Against the setting's god-wars and city-sieges, it offers a single damned figure navigating grief, guilt and thirst, and it opened a continuing series following Cado's wanderings. For readers drawn to the Soulblight Gravelords, or to vampire fiction that treats the condition as tragedy rather than power fantasy, it is among the essential modern entries in the range.