AETHRA: THE LAST PILGRIMAGE

Aethra was never ruled by humans. It belongs to the Orani—seven peoples shaped by ancient gods, each realm built upon a different idea of how civilisation should survive: freedom, transformation, knowledge, order, tradition, the sea, and balance. For centuries, the gods watched from above. Then a love story became a political wound. Nearly a century before the present, Keron of Kaelor and Vinson of Vaesh fall in love across a border neither of them was supposed to cross. Their relationship inspires an attempt at cooperation between two rival realms. When their love is discovered, Vinson is executed, Keron is exiled, and history is rewritten. Decades of occupation, slavery and resentment follow. Then, at the Festival of Accord in Maragon, a Vaeshian nationalist assassinates Kaelor’s reformist councilman. The gods choose sides. The realms go to war. Seven Orani from seven very different worlds are pulled into the catastrophe: a forbidden-cosmology professor, an agricultural engineer, a sky commander, an archivist, a field marshal, a playwright and a naval navigator. None of them begins the war. Each will help decide what survives it. And above them, the gods are fighting their own war. When Necrova, god of death, decides that divine rule itself must die, the Fracture War becomes something far more terrible. Twenty million lives will eventually be lost. And Aethra will have to decide whether the gods who created civilisation still deserve to rule it.