Embers of Ruin

The bell has been rung. Something is waking.

Three weeks after returning from the western waystation, Callen Nasinth knows the peace he came home to is already over. The Lord Regent is riding to them in person. A second dragon has appeared on the southern horizon, and it is not the one he hoped for. And the message a dying watcher imprinted on his companion has begun to open, one word at a time — opening now on a place-name Elder Shendra has not heard spoken aloud in forty years.

There are things in the south that have always been there. Callen has only just been told.

To reach what sleeps beneath a hillside older than the wars of the corruption, he must cross country that remembers what was done to it, and what the Ember Court's hand was in the doing. He rides with those he trusts — and with his nine-year-old daughter, because a figure at the edge of the firelight in the far western country once told him there would be a fifth, and he has begun to suspect he knows who.

Three forces are racing toward the sleeper. Only one will reach it first.

What waits beneath the hillside is not a weapon. It is something older, and stranger, and more dangerous to every tradition that has governed the world for eight centuries.

And it is only the first.