Solus celebrates a holiday for the dead, but the city of the Soleri is hardly in need of diversion. A legion of traitors rallies at the city walls. And inside those fortifications, trapped by circumstance, a second army fights for its very existence.
In this follow-up to Soleri, Solus is besieged from within as well as without and the Hark-Wadi family is stuck at the heart of the conflict.
Before time was the Soleri, and after time the Soleri will be. The ruling family of the empire has been in power longer than even the calendars that stretch back 2,826 years. Those records tell a history of conquest and domination by a people descended from gods, older than anything in the known world.
No living person has seen them for centuries, yet their grip on their four subjugate kingdoms remains tighter than stone.
On the day of the Devouring, the annual eclipse, the Harkan king Arko- Hark Wadi sets off on a hunt and shucks his duty rather than bow, like the sun, to the emperor.
Ren, his only son and heir, is a prisoner in the capital, while his daughters buckle against their own chains. Merit, the eldest, has found a way to stand against imperial law and marry the man she loves, but she’ll need her sister’s help to do so, and Kepi has her own ideas.
Meanwhile, Sarra Amunet, Mother Priestess of the sun god’s cult, holds the keys to the end of an empire and a past betrayal that could shatter her family.
Detailed and historical, vast in scope and intricate in conception, Soleri bristles with primal magic and unexpected violence. It is a world of ancient and elaborate rites, of unseen power and kingdoms ravaged by war, where victory comes with a price, and every truth conceals a deeper secret.
