For centuries there has been tenuous peace through the ruins of the Corinthian Empire. One bought with the blood of countless thousands, and floundering in the shadows of a cold war. A conflict fueled by magic, faith, and dragons.
The memory of mages may be long, but time begets complacency, and ambition is a wolf ever circling at the door.
Three children are cast into the royal court of the small western kingdom of Avrale. A land ever caught between the true powers of their world. Yet forces spiraling around the Ashtons hint at a larger picture. That nothing about them is at all ordinary. Even if all they want is to live their lives, and find a place in a world with other plans.
The first three books are all intended to be valid starting points, depending on one’s tolerance for a slow burn of character and place in the world, or a quicker leap into a world shaking misadventure.
In an age before kings or dragons, the last of an ancient line, and a barely more than common girl are cast together between the tribes. All signs warn of dark days ahead, as shamans speak of a deep winter, and dire things stir before the coming snow.
Yet what a would-be young apprentice means will taunt one who has glimpsed the faces of old gods. A girl almost missed amidst any crowd, and the daughter of one elders feared.
What role will two outsiders play in the turning of an age?
Who is to say if the word of a god can be trusted?
Not I.
I’ve known but the one, and am most hopelessly biased on the subject. Still, to have walked in such circles, seen such things… is it so unreasonable, to take a great deal more on well earned faith?
“Hmm. I’ve had a few. Getting a bit ahead, Imperator.”
“Have we not come to your first winter at long last?”
“Oh, near about, though Spring came first.”
A birdsong split the sky.
A low, resonant crow, which whooped into a chortle fit to wake the lands for miles around.
Right in the ear, it was a bit much. Left one with a splitting headache, and a reason to feel woozy. Distracted from the strangest dreams of a simpler life.
A young woman flailed and waved a bird from her boughs. She found herself tracing them in confusion and wobbled uneasy for their weight as she sat up.
The notion that anything at all in this was out of place jarred for a moment.
Weary eyes blinked at the bright Morningstar. A flare peaked over a lavender horizon cast across in the eternal shifting rays of the True Sun far above. The tree tops of the jungle spread below like rolling hills so far as eyes could see.
“So you claim to be of the line of Andrhale and Lycia. That the pretext of the Empire’s founding was not just convenient stories, but a history. Your history.”
“Of? Hmph. Let us say that, yes, but that it misses the osjen for the trees.”
Saline: “Higher.”
It was more as if the wind had whispered it, than a woman. The breeze on a young huntress’s ear tickled. A Sylvan bow, drawn in her hand, felt at once too easy, and so tense as her own heart, ready to snap.
Fingers pressed up under Yenifer’s arm, as a sharper message to adjust her angle.
Eyes were fixed on a deer, suspicious of a turning breeze. Her hand was starting to glow with circling, subtle bands of light.
“How did people handle the notion of a witch child with no father?”
“Quite well, if they were not told.”
“And when they were told?”
“About half, better than the witch herself.”
Autumn huffed as she pulled a bucket of water from a late autumn stream. Her reaction was more to a giant white wolf found standing across, than the weight she carried with ease. A chill warmth at last settled upon her. A sense more pleasant, than whatever else was away from there.
Lyca leaned down, and drank with casual indifference. It was never quite clear if the wolf thought herself First or Second in that tenuous arrangement. Perhaps to her, Autumn just existed, and that was it. Like the trees and the hills, the land and the stream.
Still, they did draw each other’s eye, when the wolf did not seem to appear from nowhere.
“Be wary of that which should be seen, and isn’t.”
Autumn: “You’re far too good at sneaking, for something your size. You do it just ‘cause you can? What’s the point? Something your size. Hmm, you were smaller. Was it brother bear you once hid from? The villagers? Hmm. Oi. Now I’m talking to the wolf.”
“Now your tale does veer from all records. She chose the outsiders?”
“Treaties are oft founded of promises to be broken, and truth to forget.”
Saline emerged from the Shaman lodge looking unsure, if victorious.
Autumn, behind her, was shaking her head.
Three Maji men, including Toman had joined Ander and some warriors in the square. Villagers had gathered around them. Months of suspicion gave way to curiosity, in the face of things they couldn’t control, and the reassurance of the most powerful of the men in the tribe.
A Maji woman pushed to the front of those exiting the lodge.
“At last you deign answer a question, if with no less than three implausible causes.”
“Hmm. A dream, a vision, or a potential—misplaced? Such is the story of my life. Nothing ever did quite stay where it was left in that hut.”
“One presumes you will feign ignorance of which is true?”
“I believe I already ascribed an opinion, to the most absurd. That a seed un-sown, fell in a well of potential, and flowered in another place.”
“Hmm, and your other mother planted a bow—where?”
“Yes. Poor thing, always did need the sun.”
“Again, you do not answer a question.”
“Because you know the answer, don’t you, right where all could see.”
Unguarded, a bow left in the summer sun, had deigned to take root, and stood tall. Many had dared touch it, a few Saline had seen. None tried to move it.
Though grown not an inch since the spring, and not a branch in sight, it was covered in leaves that as a season waned, began to fade.
Saline gently brushed a fresh lone blossom grown at the tip.
Satia: “I still do not like this… way of watching over such a strange object. Placing it in plain view of all.”
Saline: “It needed sun, but it likes the fire. Silly thing.”