Graveyard of Empires
Space Opera · Political Sci-Fi · Military Sci-Fi · 5 Books
In a galaxy torn by civil war, scattered heroes discover the conflict is orchestrated by forces far older and more dangerous than any human empire.
I've been working on Graveyard of Empires for a long time. It started with a single question: what does it look like when a child becomes a weapon? Not metaphorically. Not a tragic backstory. I mean literally trained and deployed like a military asset — given to people who will shape them, break them, and point them at enemies.
From there, it grew. The thing about space opera is that you have room to sprawl — across decades, across star systems, across the lives of a dozen different characters who don't know each other yet but whose choices are slowly converging on the same catastrophic point. I loved the challenge of that. The Malazan Book of the Fallen is one of my favorite series precisely because it trusts the reader to hold a dozen threads at once. Graveyard of Empires is my attempt at something similar — big, ambitious, sprawling, and deeply personal.
The story follows multiple storylines across generations. A Ministry official who discovers a boy with telekinetic powers that shouldn't be possible. A rebellion leader who lights the galaxy on fire and has to live with the cost. A ship captain doing awful things because her orders said to. A political exile who builds a fleet in silence while the republic he hates tears itself apart. And threading through all of it, the child named Traq — who starts the series as a mystery and ends it as something the galaxy has never seen before.
Here's the problem with writing a series this big: every character believes they're the hero of their own story. I didn't want a clear villain. I wanted people making choices that made sense from inside their own heads, even when those choices were catastrophic. Whether I pulled that off is something you'll have to decide.
The Books
Book 1: Graveyard of Empires
In a galaxy ruled by neural implants, one child has impossible power.
When Ministry official Argus Wade discovers young Traq — a boy displaying telekinetic abilities without any technological enhancement — he knows he's found either the key to salvation or the weapon of annihilation. Others will stop at nothing to control the child.
Meanwhile, rebel leader Darius Gray ignites a fire that will consume empires. Multiple storylines span decades: a gifted child raised as a weapon, infiltrators trained as terrorists, a ship captain fighting corruption, and a political exile building a fleet in the shadows. All their paths will converge in ways none could predict.
Where empires fall, new powers rise. In the graveyard of civilizations, humanity's greatest conflict is just beginning.
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Book 2: Collision of Worlds
Two years after rebellion ignited, the war between Union and Empire has escalated beyond anyone's worst fears. Fleets clash in apocalyptic battles that incinerate worlds. Child assassins emerge from shadow programs. Betrayals ripple across civilized space.
Traq Lane is no longer a child — and no longer innocent. The war has shaped him into something dangerous. But is he a weapon to be wielded, or a force that will reshape the galaxy?
As timelines converge and long-laid plans reach fruition, everyone must choose their side. Some will fall. Some will rise. And some will discover that the collision they've been racing toward was engineered by forces they never suspected.
In the Graveyard of Empires, everyone believes they're the hero of their own story. They're all wrong.
Coming soon to Amazon.
Book 3: Echoes of Time
The war that tore the galaxy apart is about to become irrelevant.
Traq Lain survived battles that broke him. Haunted by the children he couldn't save and the mentor he lost, he drowns in alcohol until a mysterious contract offers something more valuable than money: answers about the Vanguard program that made him a weapon.
One assassination leads to another. One station that should not exist changes everything. Six hundred years ago, 700,000 people vanished aboard the legendary Progenitor station. The official story: lost to deep space. The truth: something ancient consumed every mind aboard — and has been waiting ever since.
The implants that created super-soldiers? Reverse-engineered alien technology. Every enhanced warrior is a receiver. Every implanted mind is a doorway.
Coming soon to Amazon.
Book 4: Firelight
The planet Novum has been classified, forgotten, and buried for three hundred years. The empire has very specific reasons for that.
When xenoarchaeologist Dr. Alonso Quentin leads a survey team to Novum, they find Archive Seven — and Ailana, a warrior who survived planetary sterilization as a child, lived in the wasteland for three centuries, and has been waiting for exactly this moment.
The files document Project Prometheus: imperial authorization for mass murder, 47,000 colonists used as experimental subjects, and a biological weapon still capable of devastating inhabited worlds. Nine survivors must stay alive through assassination attempts and a military coup to testify before the Galactic Council.
Some truths, once told, cannot be unspoken.
Coming soon to Amazon.
Book 5: Traq's Resistance
Stripped of his Vanguard implant, Traq Lain must forge an impossible galactic coalition before an alien intelligence completes its harvest of humanity.
Three weeks in a medical coma. A surgically sealed socket at the base of his skull. The alien entity that consumed the Arcadia still threads through residual neural pathways in his mind, counting down to a fleet arrival he feels in his sleep.
Without his enhancement, Traq must build what no one in this galaxy has managed: a coalition between the Kanian Empire and the Union they've been destroying for decades. The entity doesn't negotiate. It doesn't threaten. It hunts. But it has never encountered a mind that refuses to organize its own surrender.
Coming soon to Amazon.
Meet the Characters
Traq Lain
Threads through the entire series — starting as a mysterious child with impossible abilities and ending as something the galaxy has never quite seen before. He's not a chosen one. He's a kid who got discovered, trained, used, broken, rebuilt, and forced to become whatever the situation demanded. By Book 5, he's fighting to save a civilization with no superpowers left. Just himself.
Darius Gray
The rebellion. The fire. The man who convinced millions to die for a better galaxy, and who has to live with what that costs. One thing I've learned is that revolutionaries are the most complicated people to write — because they're usually right about the problem and catastrophically wrong about the solution.
Kristi Grove
The one who makes you uncomfortable. A ship captain doing what her orders say — and the orders are wrong, and she knows it, and she keeps going anyway. Her arc is one of my favorites in the whole series. Not because she's heroic. Because she isn't.
Alaina Naylor
Opens Book 1 as a child at a political rally. She's the human-scale lens on everything that follows — the civilian perspective on a conflict being fought by people with enormous power and ordinary blind spots.
Argus Wade
Discovers Traq and sets everything in motion. A Ministry official doing what he thinks is right, for reasons that make sense inside his own head. His daughter Abi is six years old and has power that terrifies everyone who encounters her. For me, those two characters together represent the series' central question: what do we do to children when we're afraid of what they might become?
What This Series Is Really About
This series doesn't shy away from hard things. The cost of war — and what it does to the people who fight it, and especially to the children caught in the middle. Corruption of power: how institutions that start with genuine good intentions become mechanisms of control and violence over time. The archaeology of fallen civilizations and what we learn, or fail to learn, from the ruins of what came before.
Multi-generational conflict runs through everything. The decisions made in Book 1 echo into Book 5 in ways the characters couldn't anticipate. There's something about hubris here too — about what happens when humans assume they're the apex of the food chain. The ancient alien mystery that surfaces in Book 3 recontextualizes everything that came before. The war you've been reading about? Turns out to be a distraction.
PTSD and trauma are present and treated seriously. So is the cost of genocide — not as a background detail but as something that characters have to carry. The series counts its dead. It doesn't let you forget them.
Fans of Malazan Book of the Fallen, The Expanse, Foundation, and Dune (especially its political elements) will enjoy this series.
Content warnings: War violence and mass casualties, genocide, character death, PTSD and alcoholism, child soldiers, political manipulation, generational time jumps, sexual assault mention, psychological horror.
Graveyard of Empires is part of Lincoln Cole's connected fiction universe — a shelf of series that share characters and lore.
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