Victor Blackburn

Between three primordial spheres bound across the freezing stratosphere by petrified ironwood root-towers, an impending orbital alignment threatens to snap the celestial bridges for four centuries. Below in the permafrost gloom of the lower sphere, entire peoples face extinction unless they can seize living ember-moss from the sunlit upper canopy. Armed with an ochre alchemy that tethers the momentum of thrown pebbles to crushing fifty-pound stones, Kayadu dangles over the infinite cloud abyss to infiltrate the canopy groves. Above, veteran tracker Nkeoma hunts the lower-world raiders along sheer bark precipices—even as she unravels evidence that her own chieftain plans to sacrifice the garrison and flee to the highest realm. On bark cliffs where a cut rope means a ten-thousand-mile fall into white silence, survival is a brutal equation of kinetic force, fading heat, and mutual betrayal.

On the continent of Tolna-Karcag, death leaves behind something far colder than rotting flesh. When soldiers fall beneath photolytic shellfire, their dying agony stains the reactive atmosphere, leaving upright, pitch-black silhouettes that drain warmth from the frozen earth and petrify entire valleys into silent stone. Dorottya Illyési is an incinerator-herald, wielding a heavy brass thermite lance to vaporize these uncanny shadow-hulls before the trench front freezes solid. But as three coal-starved continental leagues clash over dwindling fuel reserves, Dorottya uncovers an atrocity behind her own line: her army's marshals are systematically executing captured enemy battalions to erect freezing defensive walls of shadow-corpses and farm expendable phantoms. Trapped between an enemy counter-offensive and her high command's monstrous industrial slaughter, Dorottya must turn her lance against her own army's depot before the creeping frost swallows every living breath.