Simault and the Master

Simault and the Master

He kicked the monastery gate because no one would answer it.

Three weeks of dust and mountain road behind him. A merchant's fortune abandoned without explanation. And a question Simault could not stop asking, ever since the afternoon beneath an ancient oak when everything he believed himself to be peeled away for one impossible breath and left something behind that had no name.

Madness or revelation. He climbed a mountain to find someone who could tell him which.

What he found was an old woman who handed him a brush and told him to paint his fear.

The Master of the Temple of Clear Seeing gives no answers. She sends him to scrub mud from vegetables under Sister Moon's merciless supervision. She stands him before a black mirror that flatters nothing and shows only what is present. She extinguishes his lantern in a hall of ten thousand crystals and leaves him panicking in the dark until the stars come out. Every lesson strips away another certainty. Every time Simault believes he finally understands, the ground moves.

Then the world outside the walls stops waiting.

A king's fear becomes a kingdom's cruelty. Villages burn. Refugees fill the infirmary with wounds that no teaching can reach. And when the one person Simault cannot bear to lose is summoned back to a war he swore he had left behind, every lesson about stillness and acceptance begins to sound like an excuse for doing nothing.

He walks out through the gate he once kicked, into borderlands where victory and defeat are indistinguishable beneath the dead, carrying a candle that will not go out and no idea what he is willing to become to save someone he loves.

Some things cannot be unlearned. Some cannot be undone. And the mountain he climbed in search of wisdom turns out to have been the teaching all along.

Spanning years and continents of a world at war, from a shattered gate to the frozen summit of Kailasa, from a bioluminescent midnight sea to a flooded village rebuilding in the mud, Simault and the Master is a sweeping epic saga of one man's journey from bewildered seeker to teacher, and of the extraordinary bond between a student who demands answers and a master who refuses to give them.

For readers of epic adventure fiction, coming of age sagas, and stories of masters, mountains, war, grief, and the long road home.