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The Long-Awaited Prequel!

A thousand years before Lord Valentine, the destiny of kings is hostage to sorcery and deceit.

On the planet Majipoor, it is a time of great change. The aged Pontifex Prankipin, who brought sorcery (and prosperity) to the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, is dying. The Coronal Lord Confalume, who will become replacement is chosen. It is no secret that the next Coronal will be prince Prestimion.

Visited by an oracle, Korsibar has heard a prophecy that will plunge the planet into a fearsome conflagration and alter destiny itself: "You will shake the world!"

King of the world! Prestimion is Coronal Lord of Majipoor. The Starburst Crown is his at last.

The 30,000 rooms of the castle are crammed with eager guests and exotic gifts from the farthest corners of the largest and most wondrous planet in all the galaxy. Jubilation--not unmixed with greed and lust--sweeps through the Fifty Cities, which crowd the heights of the thirty-five-mile-high Castle Mount.

The coronation, its solemn ceremonies and bawdy delights, are Prestimion's to savor. Even love is possible again--a love that might replace the soaring passion he once knew. So why is he so sad? From whence this emptiness that darkens his soul like night?

Prestimion is burdened with a great secret, perhaps the greatest ever known. For he gained the throne through a bloody civil war, which stained the rivers crimson and strewed the fields with severed limbs. And yet it is a war no one remembers!

Prestimion swore an oath after his victory at Thegomar Edge. The war had left a scar upon the world--a scar he vowed to heal. With a phalanx of sorcerers, he invoked the awesome Spell of Oblivion and dropped it over his ravaged people like a cloak. Forgotten were the betrayals of Korsibar, the intrigues of the two-headed Su-Suheris, and the slaughter wrought by Dantirya Sambail at Mavestoi. It was as though the war had never been. Only Prestimion and two of his surviving comrades-in-arms remembered anything happened at all.

So how can Prestimion, now Coronal Lord of Majipoor, account for the devastation that still lies upon the land? How can he mourn the fallen sons and brothers who never died because they never existed? And most troubling, how can he bring to justice the kinsman who languishes in the dungeon because no one remembers his unforgivable crime?

Yet in this, his hour of triumph, Prestimion faces a rebellion far more insidious than war. When something, even sorrow, is taken away, something else rushes in to fill the void. In this case it is a global madness: a twisted violence that no ruler can control, no kingdom can keep away, and no love can long survive...

The years since first be gained the Starburst Crown have been difficult ones for Coronal Lord Prestimion and the vast, unfathoniable realm he rules. But finally peace has been restored to Majipoor. And now it is time for Prestimion to name the able Prince Dekkeret his succeeding Coronal and to descend to the Labyrinth as Pontifex. But a power from a dark past that both men believed was dead is stirring once again -- an evil more potent and devastating than either leader dares to remember.

Once, decades past, a then knight-initiate Dekkeret had his dreams stolen from him. His quest for recovery led him to a remarkable helmetthat could invade the psyches of sleeping foes, a device the newly anointed Coronal Prestimion later utilized to defeat his enemy Dantirya Sambail, tyrant of the continent Zimroel. In the fires of civil war, the terrible weapon was destroyed forever -- or so it was believed.

The noxious weed of rebellion was torn out at its roots but its seeds have borne frightening fruit. Dantirya Sambail is dead, and the hungry jackals who ran at his heels now scheme to recover his lost lands and power. At their head is the tyrant's former henchman Mandralisca -- a villain of great wiles and icy heart, who somehow has unleashed a devastating plague of the mind upon Prestimion's subjects, Dark visions are invading the sleep of those loyal to the Lords and the Lady of Majipoor -- soul-shattering scenes of madness and monstrosity, driving those inflicted to commit horrible, destructive acts. And the dark wave is flowing ever-closer to the throne, seeping beneath the doors of the 30,000 rooms of the towering edifice atop Castle Mount ... and into sacrosanct depths of the imperial Labyrinth itself.

A new campaign for the soul of Majipoor has been declared -- and its catastrophic opening salvos have been fired in silence and in mystery. Once again Prestimion and Dekkeret have been called onto the battlefield of nightmare. But this time it will be a war to the death against a foe greater than all who came before: the master of murderous shadows who aspires to be King of all.