Rich

The Six Fingers return to Northem with a powerful, magical artifact known as the Azure Font. They mount it atop the ancient Faellic tower, but have little idea of what comes next. When the Red Lady senses something "truly evil" rising in the south, they embark on their third expedition. It takes them across the nightmarish Sea of Spires and into the heart of Atmaa, the last kingdom untouched by the Askerati hordes. As they discover, something worse than child-burning zealots has awakened.

It's 2535. It is the first, desperate days of the Human-Covenant War, and the United Nations Space Command has enacted “the Cole Protocol” to safeguard Earth and its inner colonies from discovery by its merciless alien foe. Many are called upon to rid the galaxy of lingering navigation data that could potentially reveal the location of Earth and ensure the destruction of humanity.

The Expeditions of the Six Fingers take listeners back to the dungeon-crawling origins of the medieval fantasy genre. Magic spells and weapons are few and far between. Monsters are just being discovered. At the opening of the series, religious zealots are on the verge of reducing the civilizations of Arqonias to dark superstition, and only the kingdom of Northem stands as a beacon of reason against them.

It is Wedge Antilles’s boldest creation: a covert-action unit of X-wing fighters, its pilots drawn from the dregs of other units, castoffs and rejects being given one last chance. But before the new pilots can complete their training, the squadron’s base is attacked by former Imperial admiral Trigit and Wraith Squadron is forced to swing into action—taking over an Imperial warship and impersonating its crew. The mission: to gain vital intelligence about Trigit’s secret weapons, to sabotage the admiral’s plans, and to lure him into an Alliance trap.

The ancient Fael entombed the Anaxagorum in a sarcophagus deep underground 10,000 years ago. The "living book" of magic had no place in a world of reason, and if those hiding it did their job well, no human eye would ever see it again. John the Booker, Librast of Northem, writes his eyewitness account of how the execrated thing re-emerged and spilled eldritch magic over a civilization with only swords and muscle to fight it.

While Spartans get all the glory, no soldier - not even the legendary Master Chief - wins a war on his own. Gunnery Sergeant Edward Buck and his team of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODSTs) played a major role in saving the Earth from all-out invasion at the end of the Covenant War - acts of bravery and ingenuity that did not go unnoticed by the United Nations Space Command.