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I'm Richard — the person behind The Ashmarch.

By day, I do the kind of work that has absolutely nothing to do with wool traders, excommunicated inquisitors, or grimdark border towns. By evening and weekend, I've spent the last while building a world I couldn't quite let go of once it started taking shape in my head.

The Trader's Reckoning is my debut novel — the first book in a planned series, currently finished and out with beta readers ahead of publication. If you enjoy grounded, character-driven fantasy in the tradition of Joe Abercrombie, David Gemmell, or Bernard Cornwell's Last Kingdom — stories about ordinary people making hard choices, rather than chosen ones and prophecies — this is built for you.

This site, and the short stories going up here every two weeks, are as much a part of the project as the novel itself. I wanted to build the world out in the open, with anyone curious enough to follow along, rather than just dropping a finished book on a shelf one day with no warning.

From my early days I always enjoyed the choose your own adventure books reading each one over and over watching the story unfold, this is the ultimate version of that and you get to help me chose.

Thanks for being here. There's a lot more of this world still to come.