He was born property in the brutal sugar colony of Saint-Domingue, a boy mockingly called "Sickly Stick." But the man they would come to know as Toussaint Louverture saw the world differently. He saw the geometry of power in a master's limp and the seeds of rebellion in a whispered song. He learned that empathy could tame a frantic stallion, and that violence, precisely applied, could save a life. These were the lessons of a slave. He would use them to become a general.

When the drums of revolution beat across the island, Toussaint rises from obscurity. He forges an army from field hands and house servants, uniting them under the banner of French revolutionary ideals... even as he is forced to betray those same ideals to build a nation. He outmaneuvers European generals on the battlefield and outwits Parisian diplomats in the drawing-room, playing empires against each other in a deadly game for his people's freedom.

The Opening is not just the story of the only successful slave revolt in history. It is the story of a man forced to weigh the price of freedom against the cost of order. It is the story of a liberator who must become a dictator, a former slave who must become a master of men, a revolutionary who discovers that the hardest war is the one fought against his own people for their own good.

This is the epic, forgotten story of the birth of Haiti, and the tragic, brilliant man who dared to imagine a world where slaves could become masters of their own destiny, no matter the cost.