Grave Empire

Grave Empire is a fantasy novel by the British writer Richard Swan, published in 2025 and set in the same world as his Empire of the Wolf trilogy, two hundred years after the events of those books.

The book is told through two strands that are played against each other. Renata Rainer is a diplomat with more education than authority, sent to assess a prophecy she does not accept and forced to negotiate with the mer-men for magical help the empire has spent two centuries pretending it does not need. Peter Kleist is a lieutenant from a noble family posted to a frontier fort where supernatural enemies are killing Sovan soldiers and where the officer in command, Von Oldenburg, is a nobleman with an interest in occult knowledge that the law of his own country forbids. Swan treats the empire's bureaucracy and its army with the same attention, so the diplomatic missions and the frontier chapters both turn on paperwork, obligation and the question of who is permitted to know what. The distance from the earlier trilogy is the point: the same institutions two hundred years on, and the prohibitions of a previous generation now standing between the empire and its survival. The novel is the first book of a new sequence in that world.