Dark Star Burning, Ash Falls White

1


Power is survival. Power is necessity. Those who seek power must first take it; where it does not exist, they must create it.

--Unknown, Classic of Gods and Demons


Elantian Age, Cycle 12

The Northern Steppes


The ruins rose before him like a graveyard, blackened bones jutting from the ground and gaping at a storm-gray sky.

Xan Temurezen drew to a stop. The steady crunch of his sheepskin boots against snow fell away, and silence swept in, broken only by the distant keening of the wind and his own heartbeat. Around him: a landscape shrouded in white as far as the eye could see. The color of mourning. It was as though the earth itself grieved the day a people and a civilization had died, their last moments now buried beneath the passage of time, the turns of cycles.

Zen held his breath as he knelt by the remains of a charred stone wall. All the ancient tomes and scraps of maps he had studied had pointed to this place, where the great Mansorian clan s palace had once stood--and where he, Xan Temurezen, its heir, had come to reclaim it.

He brushed away a mound of snow, revealing an engraved stone plaque. He immediately recognized the swirly, linear writing as Mansorian, standing in sharp contrast to the neat, boxlike Hin characters. Some clans, like the Mansorians, had cultures so distinct that they had their own writing systems, different from the standardized Hin language the Imperial Court had forced all to adopt.

Zen s memory of the Mansorian script had faded, but he could read enough to understand.


Palace of Eternal Peace


His hand gave a tremor; his heart tumbled in his chest. This was it: the lost palace of his ancestors. The place from which Xan Tolurigin, the Nightslayer, had ruled until the end of his civilization. The starting point of Zen s revolution.

Zen had been born two generations after the fall of the once-mighty Mansorian clan, following the war waged by his great-grandfather Xan Tolurigin

Amélie Wen Zhao was born in Paris and grew up in Beijing, where she spent her days reenacting tales of legendary heroes, ancient kingdoms, and lost magic at her grandmother’s courtyard house. She attended college in the United States and now resides in New York City, working as a finance professional by day and fantasy author by night. In her spare time, she loves to travel and spend time with her family in China, where she’s determined to walk the rivers and lakes of old just like the practitioners in her novels do. Amélie is the author of the Blood Heir trilogy—Blood Heir, Red Tigress, and Crimson Reign—as well as Song of Silver, Flame Like Night, its sequel, Dark Star Burning, Ash Falls White, and The Scorpion and the Night Blossom.

"An action-filled tale of love, magic, and demons."  Kirkus Reviews