The Story of Aegis

Unar wakes to an empty world. His city is silent, its streets deserted, and a wall of glowing plasma is rising on the horizon, kilometers high, rolling toward him. He closes his eyes ... opens them on another planet. Aegis is all that survived. Two thousand years ago a catastrophe scraped a civilization off the face of Primis, leaving one shielded plateau clinging to the edge of a bottomless void, under a sky with two moons. The people who saved it are dwindling. Their old alliances are breaking. And once every hundred years, the ancient gate sends them travelers from Earth, one at a time, across a single brutal night. They arrive with nothing into a world of tattooed warriors, monsters that hunt them, cliff-severing sorcerers, and villages already tearing themselves apart over what to do with the newcomers. Some see the travelers as hope. Others see leverage worth killing for. And one of them carries a compass that answers to him alone, built for a purpose no one alive remembers. Five strangers. One dying world. And a door home that no one knows how to open.