3 books · the series is complete
The First Exile Trilogy
He was the first murderer. He was never allowed to die.
Mythic dark fantasy · biblical retelling · adult · for readers of literary vampire fiction and biblical retellings
He was the first murderer. He was never allowed to die. The First Exile Trilogy follows Cain from the field where the world's first blood went into the earth, across the flood that drowned the city he built, and down through every empire that rose and fell while he kept walking. A mythic dark fantasy of exile, hunger and the longest sentence ever passed, told from the first morning of the curse to the ordinary field at sunrise where the oldest question in the world is still waiting.
Reading order: Exile from Eden · The Kingdoms of Dust · The Last Brother
Book I of The First Exile Trilogy
Exile from Eden
HE WAS THE FIRST MURDERER. HE WAS NEVER ALLOWED TO DIE.
The blood went into the earth, and the earth accepted it without judgement. Cain kills his brother in a field, and God does not kill him back. He is marked instead, made unkillable, and sent east to live with what he has done. Exile teaches him three things. His wounds close. His years stop counting. And there is a hunger in him now that bread cannot touch. So he builds the first city. He fathers a line. He watches the thing inside him pass into his children’s blood, and he understands at last that the mark was never protection. It was a sentence with no end. Then the rain begins, and the world he made is taken back.
Book II of The First Exile Trilogy
The Kingdoms of Dust
THE WORLD DROWNED. THE PUNISHMENT DID NOT.
Cain wakes in mud, and the world he built is gone. The water has taken the city, the graves, and everyone who knew his name. What it did not take is the hunger, or the mark, or the years that refuse to end. So he walks into the new world as a stranger, and for the first time nobody recoils. Men are raising towers, inventing kings, cutting laws into clay, and building gods out of dust. Cain works beside them under borrowed names and watches his own story harden into a legend that gets almost everything wrong. But his blood survived the flood in other bodies, and the Line is spreading. Some of his descendants are worshipping what he is. Others are hunting it. Then, in a province of an empire that has never heard of him, a teacher is executed and does not stay dead, and Cain finally hears the only answer he has ever wanted.
Book III · the conclusion of The First Exile Trilogy
The Last Brother
HE OUTLIVED EVERY WORLD. HE NEVER OUTLIVED ONE MORNING.
Rome burns, and Cain is still walking. Plague empties the villages he passes through. Machines take the work of hands. Trenches swallow a generation of sons. Empires rise on the promise that they will last, and Cain watches every one of them go into the ground, because outliving the world turns out to be the same thing as burying it. His own blood has organised itself in his absence. The Line has houses now, and doctrines, and a man called Dariel who has decided what the deathless are owed by everyone else. He does not want Cain’s forgiveness. He wants his blessing. Refusing it will cost more than Cain has left to lose. And at the end of all of it, the oldest question in the world is still waiting for him in an ordinary field at sunrise.
M. A. Khan writes at the meeting point of ancient warning and modern consequence. A British author with a previous career at the sharp end of military and trauma medicine, he brings a surgeon's economy and a soldier's eye to stories that range from apocalyptic geopolitical thrillers to mythic dark fantasy. His books ask one recurring question: when the old stories said we were warned, what exactly were we supposed to do about it? He writes as M. A. Khan; his nonfiction appears under Mansoor Ali Khan. Published by Perch Press.