2022 Royal Dragonfly Award Winner for Science Fiction/Fantasy"This is dark fantasy at its best ... "—The Book Commentary A gripping, award-winning debut for lovers of traditional high fantasy, set in the dying world where humanity is likened to weakness, and the only path to salvation is the same path which might lead to death.The Blight. The end of Mankind. The Bridge that may be salvation or the final betrayal. In this grimdark fantasy, Elika, an orphan on Terren's streets, hates and fears the bridge that spans the great chasm to the Deadlands. Like everyone else, she clings to the hope that purging every lingering echo of magic from the world can stop the Blight.Then she discovers that magic is hiding within her, and through her it seeks to enact the will of its own. Everything Elika knew about her past shatters, as long-buried secrets about her true birth emerge. Accused of being a...

For humankind, she would be the monsters' monster. She would be their fear in the night. She would be the terror come for them. Elika crosses the Bridge to Magic to find the world ruled by magic, where nothing is as it seems. Mages run the streets, whilst the tsaren, their masters, war with each other. Though it is men who pay the price with their lives.Faced with the injustice of the mages and the new world order, Elika discovers her own untapped gifts that may yet shift the balance of power back into the hands of men. But her dabbling in the power she does not understand draws the attention of the dreaded demigod Syn'Moreg. Elika must now outwit the shadow that hunts her, whilst seeking a way to free mankind from their oppressors. Yet dark grows her heart, and to darkness it reaches for that which the shadow denies.As whispers of newly found heir to the Sacred Crowns grow to cries of war, Elika comes to realise that she may...