The First Stone (the Last Rune, 6)

The Pale King has been defeated, his legions decimated. The Dark God Mohg has been destroyed. And the evil corporation, Duratek, has been disbanded, foiled in its efforts to strip-mine the world of Eldh. And for our heroes, three years have passed in relative peace. But only relative, because every one of them know in their hearts that their duties are not yet ended. For perihelion approaches, as the two worlds continue to grow nearer. And bad things are coming in its wake.

In the skies over Earth, astronomers have noted an anomaly which seems to be swallowing stars whole. On Eldh, these rifts in the sky are appearing as well--and the dragon Sinfathisar tells Grace Beckett that, if left unchecked, these holes of anti-being will annihilate all of creation forever. He adds that only Travis Wilder--whom the Mournish believe is fated to raise the lost city of Morindu the Dark from the desert sands that hide and hold it--can save the world. But what is the connection between the lost city of the sorcerers and the wounds that rift the heavens?

As Grace goes in search of Travis and Travis goes in search of his kidnapped daughter, all the threads of fate begin to pull together, revealing ancient mysteries on both worlds, and connections within connections that carry all the way back through time. With both worlds increasingly wracked by tempests and earthquakes and a palpable sense of hopelessness and despair, and with magic sputtering and dying around them, can our heroes patch together the missing pieces of the puzzle before all of life is annihilated?

Mark Anthony learned to love both books and mountains during childhood summers spent in a Colorado ghost town. Later he was trained as a palaeoanthropologist but along the way grew interested in a different sort of human evolution--the symbolic progress reflected in myth and the literature of the fantastic. He undertook Beyond the Pale to explore the idea that reason and wonder need not exist in conflict. Mark Anthony lives and writes in Colorado .