Book One – Chapter 1

Midnight halted at the base of , her body lowered and her muscles drawn tight beneath her dark coat. Yves felt the reason for her unease. The pull grew stronger with every step.

“It must be a grand artefact,” he said to her. “What you feel is the pull of Rothar.”

The words cost him several breaths. The air had become increasingly sparse. Yves understood that he was breathing; his body did all the right motions, raising his ribcage and expanding his lungs with all the fool-hearted false hope it could muster, yet the air did not seem to reach him. It entered him, but it gave him nothing.

The Witch Mother had refused to tell them what was. Beyond its name, Yves and Midnight knew nothing of what lay at the heart of the spiralling monoliths, buried deep within . She had revealed only that its hunger for world energy had ruptured the Northlands and hollowed them into the desert that remained. If she spoke truth, then whatever awaited them was not a building or artefact in any ordinary sense. It was a self-sufficient ruin, the remains and remainder of an age before measure; perhaps older even than the sundering that tore the dragon realm from the world below.

Whatever it was, it still fed. It still drew Adhar from the world. Its reach extended across the full breadth of the Northland desert. This was why the lightning formed. It happened when vast quantities of free world energies shifted at once. When great masses of Adhar moved, they dragged the surrounding light fragments with them. Such fragments of light never moved alone. Light existed in chains; connected sequences in which each fragment was held in relation to the next. Under sufficient force, when too many individual fragments were driven together and crushed into contact, those fragments tore. That rupture propagated along their chain. It raced through the linked fragments in violent succession, where one break forced the next, and the next, and the next, until it reached every last one. This cascading failure of a chain was what ordinary sight perceived as lightning.

And the lightning storm beyond the dune was nothing if not violent.