by
When Shea Ashcroft refuses the queen's brutal order to gas a rioting crowd, he's exiled to the border with an impossible task: overseeing the construction of the largest defensive tower in history. Drakiri refugees hate and fear the tower—it mirrors one from their past that opened a gateway to an unimaginable threat.
- 1 To Be Read list
Publisher: Caezic SF & Fantasy
Editors:
Cover Artists:
Genres:
Tropes: Alien Artifacts, Conspiracy, Dystopian Governments, Fallen Hero, Fish Out of Water, Interspecies Romance, Lost Civilization, Parallel Worlds
Word Count: 100000
Setting: Secondary world
Languages Available: English
Tropes: Alien Artifacts, Conspiracy, Dystopian Governments, Fallen Hero, Fish Out of Water, Interspecies Romance, Lost Civilization, Parallel Worlds
Word Count: 100000
Setting: Secondary world
Languages Available: English
On the eve of the riots that had cost him his title, Shea had already known it would all go to hell.
A dog howled. Terracotta roof tiles and hues of yellow trapped in the windows’ cages, smoke plumes threading from the chimneys, translucent against the setting sun and pumice-like where the evening had turned the sky into burnt paper. Shadows filling into the streets’ troughs. Somewhere in that maze, an animal wailed.
He leaned against the balustrade while a part of him, inside, shrunk back. Remain ministerial, would you? He’d almost allowed himself to believe the day was over and the rioters wouldn’t advance—but the howling sounded like an atonal prelude to something sinister, something that would end up consuming first the windows, then the roof tiles, then the plumes. Shut up, please shut up before you wake the monster.
READ MORETwo miles of the city lay in front of the Red Hill, in plain sight; beyond that, distance mashed the buildings together. Pine Square, Arts Square, The Canal—he had no idea what was happening there.
“I have some news you won’t enjoy, Minister.”
Darren, the commander of the palace guard, entered the balcony and, without further explanation, handed him a spyglass.
Shea said, “Do you reckon someone’s hurt that dog?”
“What?”
“The howling.”
“Who cares? I’ve got news. Look south.”
“What’s going on, Darren?”
The man propped his elbow on the balustrade and shrugged, which meant, Better you see for yourself.
Even through the spyglass’ lens, all that remained of the city’s southern part was a coal facsimile—devastation and evening erased all detail. One thing they couldn’t erase, though: a wedge of skyrafts, painted orange by the sun, creeping up the sky.
“It’s not that many,” Darren said behind his back. “Nine rafts, but loaded to the brim with gas. They’ll be here in half an hour.”
COLLAPSEJamie Buxton on Daily Mail wrote:"Mind-expanding"—Kirkus (starred review)
Adam Weller on FantasyBookCritic wrote:"Dreamy and precise, huge in scope and very personal, this is a towering achievement and a genre-busting tour de force."
Nils Shukla on The Fantasy Hive wrote:"An imaginative, heady clash of fantasy and science-fiction that delivers powerful messages."
"Triumphs in its emotional and unsettling storytelling."
