Sakori: Son of the Dark Alpha

Sakori: Son of the Dark Alpha is a young adult dark fantasy novel by American author Tony James Nelson II, writing as Tribal Brown. It is the second novel in the Children of the Dark Alpha series and an entry in the larger Tribal Universe. The story is told in the first-person retrospective voice of Sakori, following him from the destruction of Vhar’Kori at age nine to his departure from Murder Island as the Prince of Gia at eighteen.

The novel begins with Sakori as the son of a livestock-raising family whose village is destroyed by the expanding Ka’Rukan Empire. Chained and taken through the black gates of Khar’Rukan, he grows inside the household responsible for his loss. Utrea claims him as her son, while the warrior he knows as the Dark One becomes a father without erasing the birth father he killed. Sakori’s anger makes his Ka’ru rise with unusual speed, but the central challenge of his training is learning that Fury is only a gate to greater power: the energy remains his, and control determines where it goes.

At the story’s emotional center is Sakori’s relationship with Yanna, a defiant girl from Halvek whose home is later massacred by Rimitorry “Rim” Ka’ Tora. Sakori and Yanna refuse to make love an excuse for forgetting what their families did to one another. Their marriage under Blood-Law is based on mutual choice, separate identities and the right to preserve the names Vhar’Kori and Halvek. When Yanna disappears during their fourteen-day survival test, Sakori’s uncontrolled Fury turns a rescue into a massacre and leaves him facing the same question that has followed him since childhood: whether power protects the people he loves or teaches him to destroy in their name.

Sakori: Son of the Dark Alpha

Cover of Sakori: Son of the Dark Alpha
Author	Tony James Nelson II writing as Tribal Brown
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Children of the Dark Alpha
Release number	2
Genres	Young adult dark fantasy; coming-of-age fantasy
Publisher	Roovet Books
Publication date	Forthcoming
Media type	To be announced

Premise

Nine-year-old Sakori lives in Vhar’Kori, a pastoral settlement known for livestock and durable horses. The village survives raiders by surrendering enough property to make further violence unprofitable. That strategy fails when the six dominant warriors behind Ka’Rukan decide the settlement’s animals, workers and knowledge are needed by their growing empire. Vhar’Kori resists, Sakori’s family is killed and he is taken to Khar’Rukan in chains.

Inside the empire, Sakori is educated and trained by the same adults he has sworn to hate. Utrea gives him a weapon worth carrying, protects his right to remember his first family and eventually names him her son. The Dark One trains him to fight and control Ka’ru without demanding forgiveness. Sakori becomes part of a large chosen family that includes Rim, Eshari, Polezah, Zafira and Khalembo, yet the novel never treats belonging as proof that the conquest of Vhar’Kori was justified.

Sakori’s rise as one of the Red Heirs brings him to Halvek, where he meets Yanna. Their bond challenges the political logic of Ka’Rukan because Yanna sees protection, tribute and conquest from the side of the people required to pay. After Halvek is destroyed, the two choose one another without pretending that marriage can repair either of their ruined homes. Their story becomes a test of whether family can hold grief, accountability and love at the same time.

Plot

⚠Spoiler warning: The following section contains plot details that may reveal important story events.

Vhar’Kori and the black gates

Sakori is nine when the Ka’Rukan founders arrive at Vhar’Kori. His village is peaceful by Murder Island’s standards, built around cattle, goats, horses and trade rather than military power. The visitors count its livestock, skilled workers and strategic value. When the village refuses to surrender everything, resistance begins. Sakori sees the Dark One kill his father, while his mother and brothers also die in the fighting. His mother hides him behind a cart, but he is found after the battle.

The Dark One asks Sakori’s name and recognizes his refusal to submit. Sakori spits at him and promises to kill him. During the removal of Vhar’Kori’s remaining wealth, Sakori is tied to a stake and made to watch his home disappear. He is then chained for the march to Khar’Rukan.

The black gates reveal an organized capital rather than the simple den of monsters Sakori expects. Children study, work and train; teachers and specialists taken from other settlements help build the new state. Sakori meets Rim and Eshari, rejects the Dark One’s authority and repeatedly attempts to resist. Utrea stops a warrior from striking him, offers food without asking him to forgive her and replaces the poor knife he steals with a better concealed blade. The Dark One, Utrea, Kavumo, Knargz, Zuberi and Nim’Raza each teach him a different approach to survival, combat, command or Ka’ru.

By eleven, familiarity has made hatred more complicated. Utrea begins calling Sakori “Cori,” a shortened name that initially belongs only to her. When a visiting warrior calls him a captive, Utrea puts a blade to the man’s throat and publicly declares Sakori her son. She offers Sakori her hand, and this time he takes it. The choice does not erase Vhar’Kori or his first mother; it establishes that a new family can exist beside the old one.

Zafira and the Red Heirs

At thirteen, Sakori watches the Dark One return from another destroyed village carrying three-year-old Zafira. Her brandy-colored eyes, bloodstained clothes and silent attention remind him of his own arrival. Utrea immediately claims the child, but Zafira attaches herself most strongly to Sakori. When Root-Eaters kidnap her from the palace grounds, Sakori, Rim, Eshari, Polezah, Nahla, Kovi, Sura and Veyu track the captors into hidden root pits. The children rescue Zafira and kill the cell before the adult founders arrive.

The Root-Eaters’ wider network has abducted children from Ka’Rukan’s border settlements. The founders therefore place 130 warriors under the young group’s joint field command. Sakori and Eshari take sixty fighters west while Rim leads seventy south. The campaign forces Sakori to learn soldiers’ names, families, limits and fears rather than treating command as permission to spend lives.

Sakori’s column reaches Halvek while Root-Eaters are attacking it. There he meets Yanna, a girl of his own age who fights from a cart and refuses to kneel after Ka’Rukan saves the settlement. Halvek accepts the empire’s protection and its price, but Yanna challenges Sakori’s language of law and conquest. He keeps returning to her village, where she learns that he once belonged to Vhar’Kori and questions how he can fight for the people who destroyed it.

The campaign ends at Vosh’Kalen, the final Root-Eater stronghold. Eshari finds a blue-eyed infant hidden beneath fallen stone and carries him out. The child is later named Khalembo. Of the 130 warriors who departed Khar’Rukan, 121 return: nine are dead and seventeen have been wounded. Six abducted children return in the guarded carts, while the newly found infant remains in Eshari’s arms. The force earns the name Red Heirs from enemies and soldiers who need a simple name for the fear moving beneath Ka’Rukan’s banners.

Fury, command and fatherhood

Nim’Raza wins her Calling while Sakori is still thirteen and leaves with her infant son Razhaku, Sura and Va’Lira. Her departure creates another empty place inside the family. Before leaving, she warns Sakori that Fury makes his Ka’ru rise faster but does not decide how the energy must be used. The distinction becomes the foundation of his later training: Ka’ru is his available life-force and power, while Fury is the emotional gate that can open it too quickly.

Sakori joins a major Ka’Rukan campaign with the Dark One, Utrea and Zuberi. He commands assaults, learns to preserve useful information instead of killing every defeated leader and recognizes how surrender changes the empire’s response. When the army passes through Halvek, the Dark One honors its existing agreement. He also notices Sakori’s feelings for Yanna and teaches him that caring is not weakness unless an enemy is allowed to hold the decision.

Zuberi becomes another father figure through maps, patience and quiet companionship. The Dark One accepts that Sakori’s birth father remains his father and that Zuberi can also occupy a paternal role. Near the end of the campaign, Sakori raises and directs Ka’ru without anger, makes the Dark One move during a duel and accepts the hand that once represented conquest. He calls the Dark One “Father” for the first time without absolving him of Vhar’Kori.

Halvek, Yanna and Blood-Law

Two years later, fifteen-year-old Sakori watches Kavumo leave after winning Terra’s Calling. By the time Sakori is sixteen, Halvek is struggling with failed wells, sick children and a Ka’Rukan demand for six workers. The village refuses the levy. Rim leads the Red Heirs there to enforce imperial law, discovers people hidden from the count and forces the population to kneel. Yanna alone remains standing.

Sakori recognizes that intervening with force could divide the Red Heirs and trap Yanna inside a battle between siblings. He stays close but does not draw his sword. Rim kills seventy-four people, including Yanna’s father, and orders Halvek burned. She spares Yanna and consciously presents the decision as strategy: Yanna will live as a messenger who tells other settlements what defiance costs. The scene also leaves a quieter implication beneath Rim’s explanation—she cannot bring herself to kill the girl she knows matters to Sakori.

At Marrek’s Ford, Ka’Rukan guards violate Rim’s order by locking Yanna in a storage room, striking her and taking the cord that belonged to her father. Sakori kills two of the guards after they insult Yanna and refuse his command, then offers her a choice rather than another claim. Yanna follows him to Khar’Rukan. She immediately confronts Rim, and the siblings’ argument becomes a destructive fight stopped by the Dark One, Utrea and Yanna herself.

The Dark One proposes marriage as a status every Ka’Rukan soldier will understand, but Yanna refuses to marry for protection. She is allowed to stay anyway. Over time, she trains first with Sakori and independent instructors she selects. Only after she chooses the family for herself does she voluntarily seek training from Utrea, the Dark One, Zuberi, Knargz, Eshari, Polezah and the other Red Heirs.

Yanna agrees to marry Sakori only on explicit conditions: she remains Yanna of Halvek, keeps her father’s memory, chooses her own work, controls her training and never owes Rim forgiveness. Their Blood-Law ceremony joins the blood of Vhar’Kori and Halvek without assigning ownership to either person. Yanna calls Utrea her blood-mother and the Dark One her blood-father; both relationships come through her chosen marriage to Sakori, not through a claim imposed on her.

By eighteen, Yanna has become the strongest of Khar’Rukan’s younger fighters. She defeats Rim, Eshari, Nahla, Veyu and Kovi together in a five-against-one test and surpasses Rim repeatedly. Her paired-sword technique is exceptionally clean, but the adult survivors who raised the children remain on another level: the Dark One defeats her in three breaths, and Utrea disarms her almost as quickly. The adults also recognize an unexplained crossed-wrist turn in Yanna’s swordwork, although they refuse to tell the children why it is familiar. Yanna forms loving family bonds with nearly everyone in the household while continuing to reject Rim emotionally. Their rivalry becomes comic at times, but it never becomes forgiveness.

The fourteen-day test

Before Sakori and Yanna begin their Blood-Law survival test, the Dark One and Utrea give Yanna two blood-bound black swords named No Mercy and No Surrender. The weapons can answer her Ka’ru and return to her hand within physical limits, but they cannot think, pass through barriers or overcome exhaustion and distance. The gifts are made for Yanna rather than for Ka’Rukan: they carry no imperial crest, and her older Halvek blades remain hers.

Because Blood-Law has joined their road, Sakori and Yanna take the fourteen-day test together. They must leave imperial roads, demand no aid through the family name and return together through the western ravine. What begins as survival becomes a chain of rescues involving raiders, cannibals and the Hollow-Spear Clan.

During an attack on a Hollow-Spear camp, Sakori and Yanna encounter Makhera, a bannerless fighter whose paired-sword movement mirrors Yanna’s unexplained turn. Makhera reveals that she gave birth to Yanna but rejects the idea that blood alone makes her a mother. She says Utrea gave Yanna a life and therefore gave the greater gift. Makhera also reveals that eight children survived the Chambers; six remained together, while she chose a separate road. Yanna continues to call her Makhera and reserves the name “mother” for Utrea.

The pair later enters an ancient temple where they learn that shaped magic is possible but costly on an island that consumes power. Yanna is challenged to distinguish mercy from hesitation, while Sakori learns that forcing flame through Murder Island can spend far more Ka’ru than the result appears to require. By the final day, thirty-one rescued civilians are following them toward Ka’Rukan’s western marker.

Sakori and Yanna cross the marker together on the fourteenth morning, apparently completing the test, but Hollow-Spears, raiders and cannibals ambush the civilians and the waiting Ka’Rukan patrol. The thirty-one civilians reach the protection of the shields. Yanna is wounded by a spear, and Sakori’s Fury drives his Ka’ru beyond judgment. He kills armed attackers, surrendering enemies and unarmed people trying to flee. Yanna continues fighting beside him but spares those who are no longer a threat.

When Yanna finally stands between Sakori and the remaining survivors, his fire strikes the ancient causeway instead. The buried river breaks through, separating them in steam, flame and collapsing stone. No Mercy is torn from Yanna’s hand and trapped in the causeway; she disappears with No Surrender. Sakori later finds No Mercy but neither Yanna nor a body. He returns to Khar’Rukan alone, carrying the sword and the knowledge that all thirty-one civilians survived while the woman beside him did not come home.

Prince of Gia

Eshari leads the Red Heirs’ search of the river, sink rock, both banks and surviving Hollow-Spear camps. They find no body, no No Surrender and no verified witness to Yanna’s fate. The Dark One therefore refuses a death stone and declares her missing. A later northern resistance group is rumored to be led by an “Ash Girl” named Yanna, but no witness can identify her face or swords, leaving the rumor deliberately unresolved.

Rim then completes her own fourteen-day wilderness test alone. She returns alive but carrying a stronger hunger for Ka’ru and admits that she hunted people beyond what survival required. The first Gia horn sounds as the family is still confronting what the test has awakened in her.

Utrea’s answer to Gia’s Calling is part of the founders’ longer plan to move their family beyond Murder Island. Before entering, she claims Rim by birth and offers Sakori a claim by choice. Sakori accepts. A separate conflict erupts when Utrea wants Eshari to leave with them but the Dark One insists that Eshari remain to help protect Zafira, Khalembo and Khar’Rukan. Sakori witnesses his parents’ confrontation and Utrea’s subsequent fight with Knargz and Zuberi. The dispute does not change the Calling’s law: Utrea enters with Rim and Sakori named as the children who will cross under Gia’s protection if she wins.

One hundred fighters enter the Gia Calling: Utrea and ninety-nine opponents. Alliances and outside assistance are forbidden, and the last person able to stand wins. Utrea personally kills seventy opponents as the other candidates kill one another. Every opponent dies. After defeating the final spearwoman, Utrea stands alone and then sits on the mound of bodies beneath her. The keeper names Rim the Princess of Gia and Sakori the Prince of Gia.

Before departing Murder Island, Sakori gives No Mercy to Eshari with instructions to return it to Yanna if she comes back and to let no one else carry it. No Surrender remains missing with Yanna. Sakori leaves with Utrea and Rim, while Eshari, Zafira, Khalembo, the Dark One, Knargz, Zuberi and the remaining Red Heirs stay behind. The novel does not disclose a route between Murder Island and Gia. It closes with Sakori crossing out as Prince of Gia while carrying Yanna’s name but not her sword, body or answer.

Major characters

Character	Role in the novel
Sakori	The protagonist and first-person narrator. A child of Vhar’Kori who becomes Utrea’s chosen son, a Red Heir, Yanna’s husband and the Prince of Gia. His central struggle is directing Ka’ru without surrendering judgment to Fury.
Yanna	A survivor of Halvek, messenger, paired-sword fighter and Sakori’s wife under Blood-Law. She chooses bonds with Sakori’s family while refusing to abandon her name, her father or her anger toward Rim. She remains missing at the end.
The Dark One	Sakori’s adoptive father and the ruler behind Ka’Rukan. He killed Sakori’s birth father but later teaches, claims and loves Sakori without demanding that the earlier truth be erased.
Utrea	Sakori’s claimed mother and Yanna’s blood-mother through marriage. She anchors Sakori’s sense of family, wins Gia’s Calling and takes Sakori and Rim from Murder Island.
Rimitorry “Rim” Ka’ Tora	Sakori’s sister and fellow Red Heir. Her massacre of Halvek makes her Yanna’s permanent enemy, while her bond with Sakori remains fierce, wounded and central to his decision to leave for Gia.
Eshari	Sakori’s observant older sister and most trusted field partner. She helps form the Red Heirs, finds the infant Khalembo, leads the search for Yanna and receives No Mercy before Sakori departs.
Zafira	Sakori’s younger sister, rescued after the destruction of another village. Her attachment to “Cori” reveals his protective nature and helps him learn to raise Ka’ru without anger.
Zuberi	Ka’Rukan’s commander, strategist and another father figure to Sakori. He teaches that names, logistics and information matter as much as battlefield victory.
Nim’Raza	One of the six adult founders during Sakori’s early childhood. She identifies the relationship between his Fury and Ka’ru, then leaves after winning her Calling.
Kavumo	A founder and early teacher who instructs Sakori in falling, recovery and endurance. His departure after Terra’s Calling creates another fracture in the family.
Knargz	A founder whose lessons connect pain, improvisation and humor. He later helps search for Yanna and remains behind on Murder Island.
Polezah	A healer among the Red Heirs who treats the family’s injuries, studies Sakori’s and Yanna’s different Ka’ru patterns and provides blunt medical observations.
Khalembo	A blue-eyed infant discovered after the final Root-Eater nest. Eshari becomes his primary protector, and his quiet observations foreshadow his later importance.
Makhera	Yanna’s biological mother and an independent Chamber survivor. She recognizes Yanna’s inherited sword movement but states that Utrea, not she, earned the role of mother.

Setting and mythology

Place or concept	Significance
Vhar’Kori	Sakori’s first home, a pastoral settlement destroyed for resisting Ka’Rukan. Its name remains part of his identity throughout the novel.
Khar’Rukan	The black-walled capital in which Sakori is first held, then educated, trained and accepted as family.
Ka’Rukan Empire	The expanding state created by Sakori’s adoptive family. It gives him safety, education and authority while embodying the conquest that killed his first family.
Halvek	Yanna’s home and the settlement where she first meets Sakori. Its destruction becomes the wound their marriage refuses to hide.
Murder Island	The violent, isolated homeland whose roads, wilderness trials, Callings and suppression of magic shape the novel’s conflicts.
Red Ash causeway	The location of the final ambush during Sakori and Yanna’s survival test, where the road collapses and Yanna disappears.
Gia	The kingdom claimed by Utrea after the Gia Calling. Sakori is named its prince at the end of the novel.
Red Heirs	The name earned by Sakori, Rim, Eshari and their young companions during the campaign against the Root-Eaters.

Ka’ru and Fury

Ka’ru is the living energy and power capacity carried by the setting’s people. It can be directed into speed, strength, perception, endurance, weapon work and limited magical effects. Training expands control over what is already present; emotion is not the source of the energy itself.

Sakori’s Fury is a separate emotional gate. Anger can make his Ka’ru rise with exceptional speed, allowing him to reach more of his available power, but the same acceleration can outrun judgment. The novel repeatedly distinguishes three acts: possessing Ka’ru, opening more of it through Fury and consciously directing the released energy. Sakori’s failure at the Red Ash causeway occurs because he retains devastating output after he has stopped making responsible decisions.

Yanna’s power behaves differently. She compresses Ka’ru close to her body and weapons, building steadier pressure that lasts longer. She may have a higher resting level during parts of the story, while Sakori’s level climbs faster under Fury. Their contrast prevents “stronger” from functioning as a single permanent measurement.

Blood-Law

Blood-Law makes Sakori and Yanna family through a witnessed, voluntary exchange of blood. In their ceremony, it does not function as ownership or the erasure of either person’s past. Their vows preserve Vhar’Kori and Halvek, recognize separate agency and define marriage as something repeatedly chosen.

The law also has political force inside Ka’Rukan: harming Yanna becomes an act against the ruling family. The novel complicates that protection by showing that Yanna first rejects marriage when it is presented as a solution to her legal vulnerability. She accepts only after establishing that she may stay, train and live freely without marrying Sakori.

The Callings

The Callings are rule-bound contests through which eligible Murder Island survivors may leave under the protection of an outside power. Different destinations use different rules. Nim’Raza and Kavumo depart through earlier Callings, while Utrea’s Gia Calling requires one hundred individual fighters and ends only when a single person remains alive and able to stand.

The book presents departure as an irreversible family rupture as much as a victory. It deliberately does not explain how people reach Gia after the contest or how to locate Murder Island from the outside.

Narrative style and themes

First-person retrospective narration

Sakori narrates his childhood with the vocabulary and judgment of someone able to recognize what his younger self could not. Short paragraphs, repeated words and recurring images—black gates, open hands, names, roads, blood and the rain song of Vhar’Kori—connect events separated by years. His narration is often dryly humorous around family but becomes spare and fragmented when memory is overwhelmed by grief or Fury.

Family without erasure

The novel rejects the idea that one family must replace another. Sakori’s birth parents remain his parents even after Utrea becomes his mother, the Dark One becomes his father and Zuberi becomes another paternal figure. Their love does not acquit them of Vhar’Kori. The same principle governs Yanna, who can love Sakori and Utrea while continuing to name Halvek and refuse Rim.

Conquest, law and protection

Ka’Rukan calls its rule protection, but Yanna repeatedly exposes the tribute, labor and fear beneath that language. Sakori learns that law can restrain violence, as when surrender saves a settlement, yet law can also institutionalize the power of the conqueror. The guards at Marrek’s Ford demonstrate another problem: a law is only as meaningful as the people willing to enforce it against their own side.

Choice versus ownership

Open hands recur as a symbol of choice. Sakori refuses the Dark One’s implied claim after Vhar’Kori, walks past Utrea’s hand at the palace and later chooses to take both parents’ hands on his own terms. Yanna’s conditions for marriage extend that principle: protection does not permit Sakori to decide that she is weak, and love does not transfer ownership of her road.

Power, appetite and responsibility

Sakori’s Fury and Rim’s hunger for Ka’ru provide related but distinct portraits of power without restraint. Sakori’s danger is speed: anger opens his capacity before judgment catches up. Rim’s danger is appetite: killing makes greater power feel like a reason to kill again. Both return from survival tests alive but morally altered, making survival an incomplete measure of victory.

Memory, names and home

Sakori protects Vhar’Kori first through memory and later by saying its name to Yanna. Yanna similarly insists on being “Yanna of Halvek,” not merely Sakori’s wife or a Ka’Rukan daughter. Names become acts of resistance against conquest because they preserve identities that empire would otherwise reduce to tribute, casualties or titles.

Chapters

The complete manuscript contains ten titled chapters:

1. “The Darkest Day”
2. “Through the Black Gates”
3. “The Mother-Name”
4. “The Brandy-Eyed Girl”
5. “Fear the Heat”
6. “The Hunger After Silence”
7. “Blood of My Blood”
8. “Blood-Law”
9. “A Lesson in Blood”
10. “Prince of Gia”

Publication status

The manuscript’s title page identifies the work as a Tribal Universe young adult story in the Children of the Dark Alpha series and credits Tony James Nelson II, writing as Tribal Brown. The manuscript supplied for this article is complete through ten chapters. It does not include a final publication date, ISBN, retail pagination, sales URL or cover asset.

The official Roovet Books listing for Rimitorry: Daughter of the Dark Alpha identifies that novel as the first book in the series. As of September 4, 2026, Sakori: Son of the Dark Alpha had not yet received a separate public title page in the Roovet Books catalog.

Relationship to the Tribal Universe

Sakori: Son of the Dark Alpha changes the narrative center of events that connect to Rimitorry: Daughter of the Dark Alpha and Tribal Bloody Beginnings. Rimitorry’s novel follows the Dark Alpha’s daughter and her developing hunger for Ka’ru; Sakori’s novel follows a conquered child who becomes the Dark Alpha’s son while retaining the moral memory of the people Ka’Rukan destroyed.

The manuscript establishes the detailed Children of the Dark Alpha account of Sakori’s origin: he is nine at Vhar’Kori, hides behind a cart during the attack, is chained into Khar’Rukan and initially refuses the hands and claims offered by his captors. It also supplies the family chronology leading from Sakori at nine and Rim at eight to their departure a decade later.

The later chapters provide direct origin material for the Red Heirs, Sakori and Yanna’s Blood-Law marriage, Yanna’s paired swords, Makhera’s connection to the Chamber survivors, Rim’s Halvek massacre, the Red Ash causeway and Sakori’s title as Prince of Gia. The conflict over Eshari before Utrea’s Calling also provides the younger-generation perspective on events later discussed in chapter 21 of Tribal Bloody Beginnings.

The ending preserves several continuity anchors for later Tribal Universe stories: Yanna has no confirmed death; No Surrender remains with her or wherever she disappeared; No Mercy remains on Murder Island with Eshari; and Sakori leaves without either of Yanna’s paired swords. Utrea’s victory advances the founders’ long-term plan, but it does not resolve the family members separated by the Calling.

See also

• Children of the Dark Alpha
• Sakori
• Yanna
• Rimitorry
• The Dark Alpha
• Utrea
• Eshari
• Red Heirs
• Ka’Rukan Empire
• Murder Island
• Ka’ru
• Tribal Bloody Beginnings (novel)

References

External links

• Roovet Books catalog