Dust bound

Four centuries after the sky was set burning, the world survives in pockets: colonies clenched around failing wells, roads marked by flags and watched by worse, protein that comes with legs and shells. Almost no one remembers what ended the old world, and the few who do are not telling. Arahan hauls freight east. He keeps his cargo sealed and his past where no one can read it, and he has survived fifteen years by being no one worth remembering and by never staying long enough to be owed or owing. Then a run goes wrong at the gates of Tinhome, and the city's Baron, who knew him when he was someone far worse, closes a fist around that past and sends him east with a manifest that does not match the crates. The hazard markers have been stripped from the roads out there. The men who set them did not come back. Something under the stone hears him coming. One word, carried up through the deep. Awaken. Arahan does not know what he is. He knows the heat will not leave his chest, and that his body has started moving before he decides. Far off, in a city cut down toward the deep, a keeper's daughter has heard him on the road and turned toward it, and the ranked young man walking beside her has reasons of his own that he has not looked at directly.