In thirteenth-century Europe, where faith and heresy cross over a fragile frontier, Tello D'Ormont, a veteran crusader with a turbulent past, receives a secret commission from the high clergy: to investigate strange rites in a remote village in the Aragonese Pyrenees called Santa Cruz de la Seros, a day's journey from Jaca. What begins as a discreet spying mission soon turns into an uncomfortable test of his faith and his loyalty.
In the village, Tello encounters Antenor, an enigmatic woodcutter whose ax seems to defy the known laws of nature, and Antenora, his reserved companion. From the shadows he watches exhausted peasants, comfortless pilgrims, and clerics who prefer not to ask too many questions, and Tello is drawn into a world where ancestral magic collides with the rigidity of the Church and the looming threat of the papal Inquisition. What he witnesses there forces him to ask whom he truly serves, where the divine ends, where the demonic begins, and what place steel holds in the midst of it all.
The Magic Ax is a dark fantasy novella with a thread of historical intrigue about faith, guilt, and power. Drawing on medieval legends and forgotten chronicles, it explores the supernatural in a world where a single instrument can alter the fate of many, while everyone is desperately searching for some form of salvation.
