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Held Ground: A Kingdom-Building LitRPG Fantasy
Five years ago, they took everything from her. Now she's come to take it back.
Catherine Beaumont was twelve when her uncle sold their family's keep to the empire and left her father dead on his own walls. She spent the next five years surviving on the frontier under a name that wasn't hers, waiting for the day she'd be strong enough to come home.
That day has come. And Amaranthe is waiting.
The keep she reclaims is a ruin, its wards defaced, its people scattered, its ancient guardian spirit gone silent from years of neglect. But the old magic isn't dead. It's dormant. And every wall Catherine repairs, every ward she restores, every stranger she takes in and makes a home for wakes something that the empire spent a generation trying to bury.
She'll need every ounce of it. Because the empire doesn't tolerate what it can't control, and a girl rebuilding the old faith, one threshold at a time, is exactly the kind of problem they send armies to solve.
With a mismatched company of survivors, soldiers, and outcasts at her side, and thresholds of power unlocking with every trial she survives, Catherine must turn a broken keep into a kingdom worth defending, before the empire arrives to make sure she never gets the chance.
But some walls hide more than soldiers can breach. Something older than the empire is sealed beneath Amaranthe's foundations, bound there generations ago by a warden who left one message before he I understand now why it was built on this ground. I wish I did not.
And in the ranks of the army marching toward her gates walks a face she never expected to see again.
Held Ground is Book One in The Warden of Amaranthe, a kingdom-building LitRPG fantasy for readers who love earned power, found family, and heroes who win not through raw strength, but through the harder work of holding what they've built.
Perfect for fans of grounded progression fantasy, old-magic-versus-empire epics, and stories where every threshold crossed is a victory paid for in blood.
Catherine Beaumont was twelve when her uncle sold their family's keep to the empire and left her father dead on his own walls. She spent the next five years surviving on the frontier under a name that wasn't hers, waiting for the day she'd be strong enough to come home.
That day has come. And Amaranthe is waiting.
The keep she reclaims is a ruin, its wards defaced, its people scattered, its ancient guardian spirit gone silent from years of neglect. But the old magic isn't dead. It's dormant. And every wall Catherine repairs, every ward she restores, every stranger she takes in and makes a home for wakes something that the empire spent a generation trying to bury.
She'll need every ounce of it. Because the empire doesn't tolerate what it can't control, and a girl rebuilding the old faith, one threshold at a time, is exactly the kind of problem they send armies to solve.
With a mismatched company of survivors, soldiers, and outcasts at her side, and thresholds of power unlocking with every trial she survives, Catherine must turn a broken keep into a kingdom worth defending, before the empire arrives to make sure she never gets the chance.
But some walls hide more than soldiers can breach. Something older than the empire is sealed beneath Amaranthe's foundations, bound there generations ago by a warden who left one message before he I understand now why it was built on this ground. I wish I did not.
And in the ranks of the army marching toward her gates walks a face she never expected to see again.
Held Ground is Book One in The Warden of Amaranthe, a kingdom-building LitRPG fantasy for readers who love earned power, found family, and heroes who win not through raw strength, but through the harder work of holding what they've built.
Perfect for fans of grounded progression fantasy, old-magic-versus-empire epics, and stories where every threshold crossed is a victory paid for in blood.
276 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 6, 2026
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