When York met Lancaster, England drowned in roses and blood.
The Wars of the Roses were not about roses. A Throne of Thorns and Roses is the Unwaking Library's account of the Lancastrian and Yorkist conflict — the dynastic civil war that consumed the English nobility and ended with a Tudor on the throne.
When York met Lancaster, England drowned in roses and blood. The crown changed hands repeatedly, the nobility exhausted itself, and something in the old order of England — the last remnants of the mythological world that Englaland had watched recede — finally, quietly, stopped pretending it was still present.
Like all titles in the Aethereal Histories, A Throne of Thorns and Roses is narrated by Ariaste — the immortal archivist of the Unwaking Library, the long witness whose record covers the full span of the mortal world. Ariaste was there. The vantage is long. The voice is restrained.
A Throne of Thorns and Roses is about endings — the end of the medieval English world, the end of the old nobility, the end of the last traces of the pre-Conquest order. And the question of what watches when an age ends, and whether it mourns.
