Robert PlacidoCacoethes

The Sunstone Prophecy

The books

Heroic fantasy, in order. Character first. The worlds are invented; the pressure on the people in them is not.

This is epic fantasy first. If you have spent long nights around a game table, you may notice a second language in the story — the rules are never listed, only lived.

Cover of The Architect of Whispers

Book 1

The Architect of Whispers

Some secrets are forged in light. Others are paid for in ashes.

Kaelen Voss was a farm boy on the edge of the Direwood until an army of silent, bone-skinned nightmares killed his parents and took his sister. He is left with his father’s quarterstaff, a cold amulet, and three people who decide he is worth following: a cynical thief, a fiercely protective blacksmith, and a cleric who sees things. What hunts him is after the divine spark he never knew he carried.

Cover of The Serpent’s Gambit

Book 2

The Serpent’s Gambit

A kingdom poisoned from within. A defender branded a traitor.

A year of hard-won peace at Guardian’s Keep ends when a dying knight collapses in the courtyard carrying the star-biting serpent sigil. In Argentis there is no army to fight, only a court of thorns, a paranoid High Commander, and a shape-shifting assassin named Kasdeya. Framed for the rot they came to cure, the Heroes of Stillwater have until the seventeenth night to find the mole.

Cover of Stone and Steel

Book 3

Stone and Steel

The ground is cracking. The anvil is set. But steel alone will not hold the mountain.

A relief march into the frozen passes of the Dragon’s Tooth turns into a scramble against collapse. The dwarven stronghold of Vulner Kahr is besieged at the gates and undermined from beneath, where mind-bound Earth Titans are tunneling out its foundations. Reignite the forge-heart and wake the old wards, or the mountain becomes a tomb.

Cover of The Blighted Dawn

Book 4

The Blighted Dawn

The blight has the forest and it is still spreading. Everything the Heroes of Stillwater have survived comes due at once, and the light they have been carrying has to be enough. The fourth and final book of The Sunstone Prophecy.

Nonfiction

From the working life

Cover of Apathy by Design: Sparking Deep Learning with AI

Apathy by Design: Sparking Deep Learning with AI

What if student apathy isn’t laziness, but a rational response to a flawed system?

Told through the story of Dr. Alex Rivera, a professor up against institutional inertia, this is a practical blueprint for redesigning a course: mastery-based models, ready-to-use AI prompts and rubrics, and the cognitive science behind why cram-and-forget keeps winning. Modeled after the business classic The Goal.

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