Smoldering Hearth. Sovereign Soil, #1

One village burned. One brother stolen. One empire to break. Kaelen was never meant to be a hero; he was meant for the plow. But when the golden legions of the Southern Hegemony descend upon the peaceful village of Oakhaven, the world of the fields is replaced by a world of ash. In a single morning of fire and blood, Kaelen loses his father to the blade and his youngest brother, Leo, to the "Iron Tithe"-a systematic kidnapping designed to forge Northern children into the Emperor's unthinking weapons.
In Smoldering Hearth, the gripping first installment of the Sovereign Soil series, Kaelen must lead a broken band of orphans and elders into the vertical sanctuary of the Grey Crags. Armed only with a spear forged from his father's broken plowshare and a fierce refusal to be "chaff" for the Southern grain, he begins a desperate transformation from a starving fugitive into the leader of a lethal insurgency.
From the claustrophobic silt-tunnels of an Imperial fortress to the heart-stopping, ice-slicked heights of the Frost-Spire, Kaelen's journey is an epic of resilience and reclamation. In a world where the sun has become a tool of tyranny, a farmer's son must discover that the hardest harvest is not of the earth, but of the soul. The Stone Law has been written. The North is waking up. And the King of the Waste is coming for his own.