Fantasy maps occupy a weird space for me as a reader. I don’t tend to do more than look at them briefly before I start reading, and I rarely go back to study them in detail afterwards, yet if an epic fantasy novel doesn’t have any maps, it somehow detracts from the reading experience for…
I am a huge Brandon Sanderson fan. Not just as a reader, but as an author, too. His annotations and his unrivaled transparency taught me a lot about the craft of writing, and his YouTube lectures demystified the intimidating process of taking an idea for a story through to a published work. There is nothing…
Prologue: Anchor The 19th day of early summer, 530 A.E./A.F. Azosh-ek trembled as the first sacrifice toppled over, face first, onto packed earth. He tried not to breathe, but it did no good. The after-echoes of the heathen’s death surrounded him like flames. Hundreds of tiny, purple-edged wisps of gold licked at his bloodied robe, squeezing…