Search Worlds Without End

After ten years of servitude, Nish is still held in the blackest dungeon of the maimed God-Emperor, his corrupt father.

With the sorcerous quicksilver tears, Gatherer and Reaper, the God-Emperor controls all magic and is remaking the world in his depraved image. Now he wants Nish to be his lieutenant, to become as foul as he is. But the malevolent God-Emperor executed the only woman Nish has ever loved and, even faced with another decade in prison, he cannot serve his father.

Santhenar's only hope of freedom now rests on shy, bookish Maelys, who has been given a shameful duty by her overbearing aunts. Maelys' gift will allow her to reach Nish's dungeon unseen, but how can she get him out past the all-seeing gaze of Gatherer and Reaper?

And even if she does, how can a friendless renegade with no magic take on the most powerful tyrant the world has ever seen?

The allies are trapped on Mistmurk Mountain and the God-Emperor guards every way of escape.

There's only one chance left: for demure little Maelys to confess to a crime she has not committed, though if she does it must turn her friends against her. And even if they can escape through the perilous shadow realm, the God-Emperor's armies will hunt them to the ends of the world.

Nish, Flydd and Maelys have no choice but to trek to the Tower of a Thousand Steps, on the frozen Isle of Noom. There they must seek aid from the implacable sorcerer who has controlled the world for an unknown but terrible purpose for more than a century -- the Numinator.

But on that tragic journey they will uncover a deadly secret, a folly that has been shaping life and death in the Three Worlds for over three thousand years, and now threatens to consume them all.

Nish, his battered little troop and his few surviving allies are trapped on the Range of Ruin by the God-Emperor's mighty army.

Nish's only choices are a humiliating surrender to his father or a suicidal fight to the death. Yet Nish and Maelys have to fight, and somehow they have to win, for the beautiful world of Santhenar is in peril and no one else can save it.

Stilkeen, an all-powerful shape-shifting being from the Void, has come to recover the stolen chthonic fire that once bound its physical and spirit aspects together. And it wants revenge for the mortal insult that was done to it.

But it may be too late for Santhenar. Chthonic fire has been released from its casket and is now eating away the Antarctic lands, as it once devoured the world of Aachan. Even if, by some miracle, Nish and Maelys can defeat the God-Emperor, there may be no way to stop chthonic fire, or Stilkeen, before the whole world is consumed.