Three thousand years ago, when Arent os Storm fled the fall of Thule, he brought with him more than just survivors and ancient knowledge.

He brought a weapon.

The Armor of Arent is a forty-foot-tall mecha in the shape of a knight in armor, with a crow-faced visor on the helmet, framed by wings. It can walk, it can fly, and it’s been waiting for a king worthy to pilot it. It may have finally found one.

A Knight of Metal and Magic

The Armor stands forty feet tall, as high as a four-story building. It’s shaped like a knight in full plate armor, but the helmet’s visor is sculpted into a crow’s face, and great metal wings sweep back from the side of the helmet. Every detail speaks of Thulean craftsmanship: elegant, functional, and designed to inspire both hope and terror.

It’s armed with a longsword marked with banishing runes and edged with diamond dust. If you’re facing a threat that requires a forty-foot mecha, you don’t take any chances.

But the Armor’s most extraordinary feature isn’t its size or its weapon. It’s how it moves. The entire machine is built around floatsteel, the gravity-defying metal salvaged from Thule. Floatsteel neutralizes most of the Armor’s massive weight, allowing it to walk without crushing the ground beneath it and to fly using gliding wing surfaces for directional control.

Without floatsteel, the Armor would be an immobile statue. With it, the Armor becomes a flying weapon capable of striking anywhere, controlled by thought through the crown of the Stormcrows.

Only for the King

The Armor can only be piloted by whoever takes the Pledge of Arent in the old tongue of Thukiel, while meaning what he says, and is crowned as King of the Stormcrows.

This isn’t a metaphor. The crown is the control interface. The Pledge binds the pilot to the Armor. And the sincerity requirement means you can’t fake your way into the pilot’s seat. The Armor knows if you’re lying.

Once crowned, the king controls the Armor through thought, with extensive automation translating general intentions into specific mechanical actions. Think “forward,” and the Armor walks. Think “strike,” and it swings the sword. Think “fly,” and the wings catch the air while floatsteel provides lift.

It’s elegant. It’s terrifying. But in spite of all this, the Armor is only as effective as the king who pilots it.

The Stormcrow council of elders can depose kings as well as elect them. There appears to be some mechanism for breaking the link between the Armor and a deposed king. It likely involves the former king admitting he is unworthy of Arent’s legacy. However, the exact ritual remains a closely guarded secret.

The Dance of War

There’s a very old song among the Stormcrows that speaks of the Armor performing a dance of death in war. Maxim’s father, King Urban, was a linguist and scholar. During his brief time as pilot, he tested the idea behind the song by making the Armor perform a few folk-dance steps. When Maxim’s time in the cockpit comes, he performs a more…extensive test in the same vein. The specifics are best discovered in the trilogy itself.

A Weapon In Waiting

The Armor has been waiting since the Fall of Thule. Arent piloted it in the last Immortal War, where the Powers, both good and evil, lost their physical forms and were banished from the world. After his death, it passed to his descendants, king after king of the Stormcrow line.

But not every king piloted it. Some reigns were peaceful enough that the Armor remained in storage, a deterrent rather than an active weapon. Some kings were scholars or healers who never faced threats that required its deployment.

And for the last several decades since King Urban’s death, the Armor has waited for a worthy pilot, for a king who didn’t get himself deposed by the elders in a matter of years.

It stands ready in a cave beneath the hills of Haupstadt, a forty-foot reminder of the responsibility Maxim refuses to accept. Every king of the Stormcrows has had the right to pilot it. Every king has had the duty to protect his people with it if necessary.

Maxim has the right. He has the bloodline. HWhat he doesn’t have is a belief that the crown matters.

But when the woman he loves is threatened, he’s willing to take up the crown, and the Armor might just get a pilot worthy of its power.

Enter The Armor

When a forty-foot crow-faced knight takes to the sky with a diamond-edged sword and a king who’s finally accepted his destiny, the enemies of the Stormcrows learn why Arent’s legacy has endured for three thousand years.

Some weapons wait for the right moment. Some wait for the right person. The Armor of Arent has been waiting for both.

Want to see Maxim accept his destiny? Check out the Hunter Healer King trilogy, where a reluctant king must decide whether to claim his heritage, or watch everything he loves fall to darkness.

Read the Hunter Healer King Trilogy today!