The Bleeding Dunes

Synopsis

In the far future, the desert planet Verath is the only source of Solis — a substance so precious that empires have bled for a single grain. But Solis is no ordinary drug. It does not show you glory or destiny. It shows you death. Every possible death. All of them yours. Kael Ostren is seventeen years old when his family, the noble House Ostren, is given dominion over Verath by a distant and suspicious Emperor. His father, Duke Maren Ostren, believes it is an honor. Kael knows, in the marrow of his bones, that it is a trap. Within weeks of their arrival, the Duke is betrayed by agents of the rival House Vael — men who smile at dinner and slip poison into goblets — and Kael watches his father die on a marble floor far from home. Kael and his mother Sera flee into the open desert, where the native Ashri people survive by ritual, silence, and an almost religious relationship with the massive sand-boring creatures called the Devoirns. The Ashri take them in, warily. Kael, who has been secretly consuming raw Solis to sharpen his mind, begins to fracture. The visions come in cascades: a thousand deaths, each vivid, each intimate. He drowns. He burns. He is shot through the throat during a charge he has not yet ordered. He begins to distrust every action he takes because each one branches into new dying. He stops sleeping. He stops eating. He begins to wonder whether he is a prophet or simply a boy going mad in the heat. The Ashri whisper that he is the Ashkavar — the one who sees the shape of the end and walks into it anyway. Kael is not sure he wants to be saved. He is not sure there is anything left of him worth saving. But House Vael is coming, and the Emperor is watching, and the dunes do not care about doubt.