Alchemy, they never knew what it was truly capable of. What wonders and horror one could conjure up with enough of a rotten heart. Humans have taken enough from me. They’ve taken enough from everyone. I will show them what I “Bring”. In the frigid depths of the glacier Korigara, a small blue Alerez with no name is torn from his home and sold into slavery in the city of Yalor—a metropolis operated entirely by the enslaved and charged with conjuring in the Golden Dawn, the legendary age of prosperity.

A firefighter, and his two daught— BAM! He dies. A dead firefighter, who respawns in the hereafter and awakens with a new companion who has a copy of all of his memories. Good, bad, and . . . embarrassing. So embarrassing he doesn’t want to remember them . . . but she does. Dead, but relocated to a shipping-container-sized space controlled by a ruthless company who runs the afterlife . . . with his fking guide Greg. Dead, but able to log in and out of a player vs. player survival game called Hearth. Dead, but doing his damn best to stay alive.

Not the gray of clouds, or ash, or dusk, but the kind that eats at the edges of everything. Born silent in a Dominion where colors sing, burn, heal, and kill, the world called her a void. Her village called her cursed. And Havayah? She called herself no-one, a hollow.

When seven Dartmouth students get lost exploring an underground grotto during their Caribbean spring break, they emerge to find themselves trapped on a mysterious hidden beach—a pristine crescent of white sand surrounded by towering cliffs that offer no escape. At first, their private paradise seems like the adventure of a lifetime. But as the sun sets on their first night, they realize something is terrifyingly wrong on this forgotten shore.

Thierry Villar is a well-known—even notorious— tavern poet, familiar with the rogues and shadows of that world, but not at all with courts and power. He is an unlikely person, despite his quickness, to be caught up in the deadly contests of ambitious royals, assassins, and invading armies. But he is indeed drawn into all these things on a savagely cold night in his beloved city of Orane. And so Thierry must use all the intelligence and charm he can muster as political struggles merge with a decades-long war to bring his country to the brink of destruction.