“It didn’t have to be this way, Lusin,” Vone said, through the settling rubble and suffocating clouds of dust, “Our world could have known only abundance and peace; your friend Kima would still be alive; and your heroic act of plummeting this city of Yunla into the earth to stop me and my army would have only existed in childrens’ nightmares. If only you had chosen the sensible path and let the Pl...

I engraved the ancient runes I had written in Luharas into the blank stone tablets before me. They outlined the two great stones that together made a crescent moon. It was the closed doorway I sought–one piece like the bed of fingernail and the other its thin curved tip.

All my sacrifice, all my grief that I imprisoned to concentrate instead on finding this doorway. It would all be worth it to s...

“Where the hell did you find this?!” the hooded man croaked, his voice thick, as if he talked through the velvet curtains that line the windows looming over me. Foxes’ Cradle, a name perhaps a little too precise for my taste, but I suppose the tavern owner knows his clientele; the man of the shadows whom I found in Luhara said this was the place to sell, a sanctuary for thieves, transformed from t...