Imperium

Genre: Imperium, an 115,000-word work of literary epic fantasy set in a fictional world inspired by medieval empires.

Pitch: After surviving the destruction of his city and years of slavery in the empire that conquered it, a man uniquely shaped to prevent war instead becomes the architect of a new conquest, revealing how history overwhelms individual moral will. 

IMPERIUM – SYNOPSIS

The novel opens with the discovery of a mysterious ancient manuscript. Its translator warns that what follows is fragmented, painfully honest, and perhaps more truthful than official histories.

A boy’s world collapses.
The narrator, born in a thriving eastern province of the empire, lives a peaceful childhood marked by love, curiosity, and a forbidden first romance with a village girl. Rumors of war seem distant, until the enemy king’s vast army arrives. Despite early victories, the city walls eventually fall through sabotage. The invaders unleash a three-day massacre. The boy survives only by hiding in his attic while his entire family is slaughtered.

Enslavement and transformation.
Captured with other children, he is sold in the capital of the conquerors, a magnificent, cultured city he had been raised to fear as barbaric. Condemned to years of back-breaking labor in a carpet workshop, he discovers that his captors are neither demons nor saints, but human beings with their own histories, loyalties, and wounds. He learns their language, forms deep friendships, and experiences the complexity of their society. His memories of his home begin to mix with admiration for the civilization of “the Others.”
Yet he remains a slave, and trauma never leaves him.

Rise to power.
Through skill, intellect, and circumstance, he is eventually freed and drawn into political and military service. His unique experience, knowing both sides of war, should make him a force for peace. He has lived among his former enemies, loved among them, suffered with them. He has seen that the world is larger than the lies of propaganda.

But empires have long memories, and history demands cycles of vengeance. His adopted nation faces existential threat. In the rising storm, he becomes a symbol of unity, then a strategist, then a commander.

The tragic paradox.
By the end, he has every reason not to repeat the horrors that shaped him. He understands the enemy because he once was the enemy. He alone knows how suffering travels across borders. He should be the emperor who brings peace.

Instead, carried by the currents of politics, loyalty, and destiny, he becomes the very instrument of conquest he once feared, the engine of a new empire expanding into the lands of his birth.

The final chapters reveal the central irony:
a man uniquely suited to end the cycle of violence is consumed by it instead.

The manuscript ends with a single devastating question:
Is history made by men, or do men merely play the roles that history assigns them?