A.J. Yarrow

The Great Span of Ozu-Eke was never made of stone. For three hundred years, armies and merchants have crossed the chasm on the petrified spine of an ancient sky-beast, slain in its sleep by the grandfathers of the realm. Now, the bones are groaning. Ebele-oma hangs between sky and abyss, desperately patching the splintering ribs with mortar, while Constable Ifeanyichukwu-eke demands the span bear his lord’s heavy siege engines. Far below in the canyon mud, Tobechi-adu watches parasitic bone-fiends wake from the marrow. If the bridge falls, two kingdoms will bleed—but the beast's ancient ghost is tired of carrying the weight of men.

In the Luminous Shallows, massive galleons cross between oceanic worlds by plunging down sheer saltwater cataracts in the dead of the void. Celso Valdevez is a working-class sail-rigger who stitches biotic canvas from the mantles of void-beasts. He doesn't want glory; he just wants to survive his brutal enlistment without losing his fingers to frostbite or kinetic blowback.

But when the fanatical Admiral Paiva orders a ruthless scorched-sky bombardment of a crowded atoll-refuge to extract its planetary core, the extreme magnetic firing vectors awaken something ancient and colossal. Phased leviathans rise from the deep, drawn by the silence of dying worlds and the thunder of imperial guns. Trapped aboard a flagship whose own cannons are now attracting horrific cosmic predation, Celso faces a lethal choice.

If he obeys orders, the void-beasts will tear the fleet apart from below. If he secretly sabotages the firing metrics to throw the cannons off-axis, the resulting cataclysmic blowback will cripple the Armada—and leave twelve hundred stranded sailors to drown in the dark.