melissa bain

Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her unbearable life on the swamp, and to her harsh father in Mississippi. But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle, so she forms a plan to go north.

For a thousand years the ash fell and no flowers bloomed. For a thousand years the Skaa slaved in misery and lived in fear. For a thousand years the Lord Ruler, the "Sliver of Infinity," reigned with absolute power and ultimate terror, divinely invincible. Then, when hope was so long lost that not even its memory remained, a terribly scarred, heart-broken half-Skaa rediscovered it in the depths of the Lord Ruler's most hellish prison.

As a wizard's apprentice, Mithris always seemed to feel like a duck out of water. Clumsy, awkward, naïve, and frequently a nuisance to his mentor wizard, it was hard for Mithris to believe he'll ever become the great and powerful wielder of magic. But everything changed for the young apprentice one day when vicious and foul creatures attacked his master's tower, killing his mentor, and driving Mithris into exile in the wild world outside.