Plot Synopses of books from The Droughtlands

The walking fortress of Revance has fallen, and it was by Ryza’s hand that it crumbled.

Ryza’s escape from his father is his first and last moment of freedom. Before now, he’d been destined to join his father’s work of using the mysterious liquid metal of molten flux to revive corpses into autominds. They are empty husks whose minds are used to assist in Kretatic magic, in order to control larger and larger contraptions called arcanites. After fleeing this life, he swears to himself to never make an autominds again and jumps at the chance to join the crew of the walking fortress of Revance.

The fortress’ mission is to stamp out flux traders and smelters, the savage outlaws that “source” corpses for the former, and eventually free the wastes of The Droughtlands from the mindless slaughter that molten flux has inspired. Though not all aboard Revance share this mission.

After making a bloody name for himself, Ryza discovers a renegade faction calling themselves the Locusts. They’d sooner see Revance controlled by flux traders in order to sate their greed. But Ryza’s efforts to unravel the plot only serve to aid and accelerate them. This culminates when Maligar, the group’s de facto leader, successfully manipulates Ryza into returning to the brutal ways of his flux trading father in order to rile up his mutineers.

Having earlier discovered the key to Revance’s power, an inexplicable little arcanite named Origin, Ryza then attempts to hide Origin in the depths of the ruins of those-of-glass before Maligar can get his hands on the arcanite. As retribution, Maligar severs Ryza’s left arm with a rifle shot from point-blank range.

Holm, the Locust who’d initially brought Ryza into the insidious group in the first place, turns out to be the one who saves him, spiriting him back onboard Revance to be seen to by the fortress’ healers. After being outfitted with a metal prosthetic left arm he can control with his magic as a Kretatic, Ryza and his squad mates head back into the ruins in search of Origin. Leaving the arcanite there is too risky. It was found once before, so Maligar could very well find it again.

However Ferrick, another Locust and an extremely close friend of Holm, is waiting in the buried city below the sands to confront them. The fight takes her life, that of Gry, one of Ryza’s squad mates, and nearly kills Ryza too. With no time to mourn, Ryza ventures further into the bowels of the undercity alone. His search finds the arcanite Origin, the ancient skeleton of the man that the arcanite had once been, and the place where the substance of molten flux had first been created.

This is explained to him by Archarus, a shadow dancer. Having once lived a life as a scholar, Archarus was forced to this form after a failed expedition into these very ruins, an expedition which led to the discovery of molten flux by the people of The Droughtlands. The ethereal form he now walks the world in is a result of pure resonance, a moment of unbound magic the likes of which are thought to have driven those-of-glass to their own extinction.

Archarus’ goal for Ryza is to trick him into replicating the experiment that he failed, to use the supposed healing properties of molten flux to survive experiencing pure resonance. But Ryza can’t focus on this now. Control of Revance itself hangs in the balance. With a mutiny imminent, he must take Origin to the walking fortress to ensure the arcanite is safe.

But he is too late.

When Ryza and his remaining squad mates return, Maligar is waiting. The battle is already lost. Those loyal to Revance were either taken prisoner or executed. Maligar takes Ryza and Origin to the fortress’ control room, where Tyrag, Revance’s Forgemaster, is waiting. It is revealed that he is the one controlling the Locusts, and this mutiny is one step towards assuming total control over The Droughtlands.

With Origin in his possession, Tyrag seizes the very metal of Revance, a feat that would’ve melted minds far greater than his. But Tyrag has help. The high command of Revance had been turned into autominds, and it was with them that the Forgemaster can set out on the next phase of his plan: gathering even more autominds to push the bounds of his control further.

Ryza and the other conscripts are then exiled from this new Revance, a death sentence owing to the heavy metal collars fastened around their necks. Stray from Revance for too long and they would be killed by them, yet with Tyrag in control of the metal itself, there is no way to reset the clock on them.

Except for Origin.

In a bout of hubris, Tyrag had ordered the little arcanite to be thrown out in Ryza’s possession with the rest of the conscripts. He’d intended this to make Ryza’s last days be marked ones, where the other conscripts would squabble for control of Origin if they didn’t want to succumb to collar death.

Yet in a turn of events Tyrag didn’t expect, Ryza rallies the remaining conscripts and leads them to Iroka, the town which he’d overheard was Tyrag’s next destination. They beat Revance there, but find the town deserted. It’s only when they reach the mines that they discover why Tyrag is coming here.

All ten thousand of the town’s denizens are entombed there, not as corpses but as autominds, waiting for their new master to come along. If Tyrag gets his hands on them, he’ll be unstoppable. Ryza finds Holm among them, restrained, beaten, but still miraculously alive. She tells him and the other conscripts that she tried to stop this, and despite their past violent rivalry, Ryza allows her to join their resistance.

With only days until Tyrag and the corrupted Revance arrive, Ryza and the conscripts prepare themselves for a siege that’s rarely been fought, let alone won. He and Holm grow closer during this time, and she has a freshly empowered Origin craft a new, more functional prosthetic arm for Ryza, complete with hidden gun barrel.

When Revance arrives, it’s in no form they could’ve expected. Tyrag has managed to take the entire fortress into the air, and the conscripts’ barrages do little to slow it as it bears down on Iroka. Still in need of the autominds buried within the town’s mines, Tyrag sets the fortress down in the sands just outside its walls, disgorging waves of smelters, Locusts, and traitors, as Ryza leads a motorised counterattack.

The fortress’ landing throws up a thick haze of sand, only made worse by the vicious explosive traps deployed by the Locusts. Lost in the chaos of the battle, Ryza and Maligar fight to the death, the latter fuelled by the molten flux flowing through his veins.

Maligar has somehow found a way to control the flux itself, something Origin strongly warned against. This makes Maligar practically immortal, and Ryza is only saved when Holm emerges from the haze to kill Maligar herself, a vengeance she made Ryza promise would be hers.

As the tide of the battle shifts in favour of the conscripts, Revance begins to take to the skies again. Thinking Tyrag is about to flee, Ryza orders the remaining conscripts to retreat to Iroka and continue firing upon the fortress before making it aboard the airborne fortress himself.

In the deserted corridors of Revance, Ryza only finds cowards, autominds, and copious amounts of molten flux. He confronts the Forgemaster in the forge rooms, the place where they first met. The extreme mental load of controlling the fortress has pushed Tyrag to his limits, and the barrages from Iroka have obliterated many of the autominds he was using to keep Revance in the air.

Ryza’s instinct to shoot Tyrag dead is stymied by a magnetic barrier surrounding the Forgemaster. Due to the metal collar around his neck and his metal arm, Ryza can’t even reach Tyrag with his bare hands, so he flees through the fortress, searching for a way to trick the Forgemaster into letting his guard down.

He finds the key to doing this in the control room where the mutiny first took place. Tyrag has torn apart the fortress’ guts to pursue Ryza, and Revance now hovers directly over the town of Iroka. If Ryza kills him, all the conscripts he’d ordered to retreat there would be crushed.

Before Ryza can decide what to do, the shadow dancer Archarus appears before him, telling him the only way to save his comrades is through pure resonance itself. To control the fortress with the magic that would turn him into a shadow dancer like Archarus, joining him in his cursed immortality.

But Ryza has one last option. An unthinkable one.

He injects Tyrag with molten flux, turning the Forgemaster into an automind as Ryza wrests control of the fortress from him. He rushes to control of hundreds, if not thousands of autominds as he attempts to keep the fortress in the air. The thrill of power is both intoxicating and sickening to him. As Ryza lets Revance drift through the sky away from Iroka, it crumbles, spilling molten flux and hunks of debris across the valley of Iroka.

The final piece of Revance to crash to the ground is the control room. Ryza awakens in it much later, surprised to find himself alive. In a semi-conscious haze, he tells a shadow dancer as much, and it’s only when the voice changes to Archarus’ that he realises what he may have done.

He controlled Revance, but how?

Had it been the autominds that helped him, or had it been pure resonance?

If the latter, then why was he still alive?

Lost among the dune-swept ruins of ancient glass towers, 14-year-old Spiric hunts for his stolen memories. The only clue he has is the five red runes that are inked on his right forearm, their hue matching his eyes. He’s sure the runes mean something magic, but until he can recall more, sets off into the ruins to find help.

It’s a perilous place. Echoes of strange phenomena haunt the structures, remnants of the extinct civilisation (known as those-of-glass) that created them, either through indecipherable technology or incomprehensible magic. Spiric’s wanderings lead him to a close brush with one such hazard. His saviour comes in the form of Grethard, an exiled scholar who’d been dwelling within this particular set of ruins for thirty years.

Back at Grethard’s camp, Grethard ponders which magics would be conferred by Spiric’s red eyes. If they were blue like the old man’s, Spiric would be a Reythurist, controller of wind and air. Green, a Kretatic, who’s mastery was over magnetism and machine. Yellow would denote a Curiktic, who’s flaming affinity with the sun could either be used for healing or destruction.

The mention of the Hytharo bring Spiric a moment of hope, yet Grethard quickly snuffs it out. Those people, he says, were responsible for bringing rain and storm to the Droughtlands and have been extinct for a thousand years. Their last act was to seal all water under the sky into the air itself, quenching the thirst of those who breathed it, yet precluding it from being used to concoct ink.

Without ink, there is no runes, no magic, and in the vast wastes of the Droughtlands, magic means power. The only drops to be had are those dredged up from deep below the sands.

Tensions rise as Grethard continues to deny that Spiric could be one of the extinct Hytharo, and Spiric sets off into the ruins to find water for himself and prove Grethard wrong.

In a cavern deep under the buried city, Spiric comes face to face with a shadow dancer, one of the terrifying phantoms of ruins that Grethard warned Spiric about. Seeing one is the reason Grethard was exiled and enough to drive men to a deathly madness, as it’s rumoured their magic controls the passage of time itself.

The runes on Spiric’s arm begin to coalesce in his palm as the shadow dancer speaks to him. He asks Spiric to remember him, calling him a Hytharo, yet before more is said, the runes on Spiric’s arm burn to life, summoning forth an enormous wave of water from the undercity.

The battering tide carries Spiric back to the surface and he awakes on the shore of a quickly draining lake. A gobsmacked Grethard is waiting there and Spiric uses these events to affirm that he is a Hytharo. The pair’s mission is now to find someone else to help untangle the mystery of how Spiric got here.

Spiric’s journey across The Droughtlands turns out to be just as dangerous as the ruins he and Grethard have just left. The Scythes, a militarised wing of the Academy of Breggesa, is on the hunt for Spiric, believing him to be an anomaly in The Droughtlands that must be destroyed. They are led by Vorric, the very man who exiled Grethard 30 years ago.

But Spiric is not without friendly company. First they meet Byreth, a Curiktic around Spiric’s age with a fiery personality. She’s searching for her older brother, who went out hunting for treasures left behind by those-of-glass, but she’s all but given up on finding him. After saving Spiric from a close shave with the Scythes, she throws her lot in with Spiric and Grethard, travelling north towards the city of Basarod. They also meet Tetran, a Kretatic trader that agrees to travel with them to Basarod, though Grethard treats her with suspicion.

By now, Spiric has gained more snippets of his stolen memories. He discovers that the shadow dancer he’d met in the ruins is named Arallak and was once his brother in the time of the Hytharo Empire. That their people were not benevolent but cruel and bloodthirsty rulers. And that Arallak, as a shadow dancer, was the one to throw him and four other Hytharo forward through time moments before the extinction of their empire.

Another confrontation with the Scythes outside of Basarod leaves Spiric grievously injured. While unconscious, Spiric experiences another series of memories, last of which is one of a living Arallak as he converses with an unseen shadow dancer. Arallak requests that all be forgotten, no matter how devastating the cost. A cost Arallak says has been paid a thousand times before.

Spiric awakens within the walls of Basarod, his wounds tended to by one of the city’s healers. The city’s ruler, a woman named Voss-Ela, has taken an interest in him as a Hytharo, and offers to employ her considerable staff of scholars to help him understand the mystery of his survival.

It’s clear she intends to keep him as a trophy and a means to gain respect with her scholars, but Spiric accepts the offer with caution. Voss-Ela has asked him to bring back the rain his people took, but his glimpses of the past have shown what access to so much water can do to a ruler.

It takes days for the scholars to decipher the runes that were on his wrist when he first emerged from the sand. The magic of The Droughtlands is driven by interpretation and intention, with each rune carrying the possibility of a number of different words. Together, multiple runes form an axiom, a sentence of meaning cast out into the world.

In this time, Voss-Ela explains to Spiric another theory of magic. That it is driven solely by belief, but only beliefs that are an utmost certainty to those experiencing them and those around them. Runes and axioms exist as a proxy to this, and it is said that the absence of such a thing was what lead those-of-glass to their own extinction eons ago.

Voss-Ela theorises that such a power is still attainable, dubbing it “pure resonance,” but admits it would be impossible for them to harness, as the cascading doubts of self and sanity would cause the person experiencing it to wipe themselves from existence and return as a shadow dancer.

When the scholars finally present their findings to Spiric, it’s with uncertainty, as they feel they still have an incomplete understanding.

Only now does Spiric work out the hidden meaning of the runes, saying they translate to “The Blood Forged God Of Memory,” a warning of the force that destroyed the Hytharo empire. The meaning of this is another mystery to be tackled the next day.

But that night the Scythes attack Basarod, razing the city and slaughtering its citizens in a brutal effort to find Spiric. It provokes another vision of the past for Spiric, and he witnesses the time when the Hytharo called this city Andias. The Blood Forged God of Memory, a colossal obsidian monolith, looms above the capital of the Hytharo empire, erasing all those it passes over from memory.

As they try to escape in the present, Spiric and Byreth are trapped in the tunnels below Basarod by Vorric. He’s somehow survived, hinting that he is protected by a shadow dancer of his own. The confrontation causes the tunnel to cave-in and Spiric and Byreth are only saved at the last moment by Arallak, who throws them both forward through time.

Digging themselves out of the rubble, Spiric and Byreth find themselves in the empty ruins of Basarod, six months after the Scythes had razed the city. Voss-Ela is the only remaining soul and is the one to explain all this to the pair.

Spiric has another vision of the past while in the ruins of Basarod, this time seeing Arallak from afar conversing with a Hytharo prince. The prince asks him to find “a place where time stands still” so he may wait out the turmoil of his present and hopefully right the wrongs of his bloodline.

Spiric asks Voss-Ela where he could find such a place, and she sends him and Byreth on a long journey to the east, to another set of ruins. Byreth goes with him, because she’s discovered that her brother came through Basarod searching for a treasure with similar properties.

The two-week journey takes them across plains of lone and level sands, and they eventually find the ruins, a place of more buried skyscrapers that are surrounded massive white thorns that are taller than the buildings themselves.

Entering the ruins forces them to pass through a light-bend, a place where strange things are seen, and in doing so Spiric believes he meets another shadow dancer. Spiric and Byreth explore the ruins for hours more, eventually finding Arallak close to its centre, near an enormous black pillar of stone. Spiric recognises it as the dormant form of the Blood Forged God of Memory.

Arallak leads them away from it, cautioning them both to avoid touching the strange, human shaped shadows that are standing around the ruins. He says they’re the echoes of people from the time of those-of-glass, the markings of lives that hadn’t expected to end.

At the foot of a skyscraper, Arallak motions for Spiric to enter. Spiric remembers doing so once before, concluding it was when he and Arallak were searching of the place where time stands still. At the top of the tower they find it, along with Byreth’s brother, Vehli. He is frozen within the bounds of a strange, shimmering mist, only metres away from the small black ball that Byreth says is an ephemeral, the object Vehli was hunting.

Arallak explains that the closer Vehli gets to the ephemeral, the slower his progress will be, and that it was Spiric’s vision of this moment, perceived from the past, that had allowed Arallak to remember who Spiric had been.

Arallak now reveals Spiric is a helixic, one of the few of this world that’s gifted with a shared memory that dwells outside of time, unaffected by the Blood Forged God of Memory. It’s this very moment that allowed Arallak to lead Spiric back to his own memories, to let him rediscover his past and realise what must be changed about it in the next world in order to avoid so much slaughter.

This is something he couldn’t tell Spiric until this moment, as none of this scheme would’ve worked if he had found out any other way.

This matters little to Byreth. She came here for her brother, no matter what it takes. She gives him her hand cannon, bids farewell to Spiric by telling him: “Don’t ever forget who you are to me. You are Spiric. My Spiric. This Spiric.” She then jumps in after her brother, ready to tackle him and carry him out of the field of frozen time.

Alone and distraught, Spiric mourns, begging Arallak to throw him forward through time to when his friend will re-emerge, and growing angry when he refuses. According to Arallak, Spiric still has more to do in this time, but Spiric instead resolves to simply wait in the ruins for her. Arallak leaves him to do so.

Wandering between the towers, he’s eventually drawn to the surface of the Blood Forged God of Memory. When he places his hand upon its stone face, another shadow dancer appears, the one Spiric saw in the light-bend, and Spiric experiences a bizarre moment of seeing himself through this shadow dancer’s eyes. The new shadow dancer introduces himself as Onassis, and treats Spiric as a curiosity, as he says there’s never been a time where they’ve met.

Spiric realises Onassis is also a helixic, one more ancient than the world itself. Whenever this world ends, it would begin anew, and Onassis would be there to see it through, his memories as a helixic a guiding light to keep the cycle of events identical to the last, to keep this existence stable. To this end, Spiric discovers that his supposed memories of the future never were that, but instead of a future in a world that had passed.

Onassis is who Arallak had spoken with to summon the Blood Forged God of Memory. Onassis is who saved Vorric from deaths that Vorric was never meant to experience. Onassis who viewed Spiric’s existence a thousand years beyond his time as an anomaly that must be erased to stop the world from consuming itself from doubt.

The pair now face their own dilemmas.

Spiric realises the true mission that Arallak sent him on. To create a memory that could enter the mind of a helixic far enough back in the record of the world for them to change the course of history, throwing off Onassis’ control. Doing so would create the unpredictable future that Onassis warns against, however this “stable” record of history is so filled with bloodshed and cruelty that Spiric believes it isn’t worth keeping.

Onassis, on the other hand, cannot simply kill Spiric. Doing so risks creating a new memory of the event for other helixics to discover, who exist throughout time as way stones to preserve the supposed accuracy of a helixic’s memory. If a helixic were to doubt one, they would begin to doubt the others. Spiric was never meant to make it out of the ruins he emerged from. Everything that’s happened since is an anomaly.

Onassis disappears as Vorric and the last of the Scythes come crashing down around Spiric, trapping him against the surface of the black stone monument. They are ragged and tired. Vorric tells Spiric that with nothing to show for the razing of Basarod, the council of Breggesa disbanded the Academy and purged the Scythes.

Vorric intends to take Spiric back to Breggesa in a desperate attempt to prove the bloodshed at Basarod as justified, but before he can grab him, Grethard, having somehow also survived the burning of Basarod, dives out of the sky to rescue him. He brings Spiric to the upper floor of a skyscraper and they talk briefly. Grethard tells that he’s been following Vorric since Basarod, figuring he’d eventually lead him to Spiric.

Vorric and the Scythes follow them into the skyscraper and the ensuing fight causes it to collapse. Grethard barely saves Spiric but is mortally wounded himself. His last action is to manipulate the air within the sand itself to suck Spiric down into its depths, depositing him in the subterranean city below the ruins.

Arallak is waiting there to meet him, and urges Spiric to keep going before disappearing, promising that he’ll do what little he can to protect him from Onassis. Spiric sets out to explore the place, drawn towards the pillar at its centre marking the Blood Forged God of Memory.

A bottomless pit surrounds it. At its edge, Spiric recalls standing there with Arallak when his brother was alive. The shadow dancer Arallak reappears at his side in the present, mourning the way he’d raised his brother to be a ruthless killer, and that he wouldn’t experience all the violence he’d bring once, but every time this world repeated. This their only chance to change their path.

Onassis appears to taunt them, telling that Spiric was always meant to die in Andias as he attempted to fend of the waves of desperate warriors as they tried to topple the Hytharo Empire. That Byreth was meant to die attempting to break into the ruins where was Grethard still exiled. But then Arallak asks what was meant to happen to the prince, the one who’d asked for a place where time stands still, and Onassis replies that he should’ve died in those very ruins, too.

With hollow eyes, Arallak turns to Spiric and tells him he’s sorry, but before he can explain, Vorric comes bursting through the cavern roof of the undercity, still hunting for Spiric’s life.

Spiric runs as Arallak attempts to hold off Onassis, the latter asking if it’s worth an hour of Arallak’s banishment for a second of his own. A shadow dancer’s magic is one of time, choosing what exists and what doesn’t at the cost of not existing themselves. Never before have two fought, because it is a cost too great to both.

Spiric hides in a set of tunnels, proceeding along them as Onassis follows and taunts. When Spiric emerges from them, Arallak is waiting. He tells Spiric he will hold of Onassis for as long as he can, even if takes him a thousand lifetimes away, to the end of days itself. After thanking him for being his brother, Arallak leaves Spiric and walks into the darkness to confront Onassis and the pair aren’t seen again.

Spiric continues, and is once again set upon by Vorric. The fight is vicious, made difficult as more of Spiric’s memories come back to him between blows. They take him back to Andias, to the moment where a woman who attacked him is helpless at the end of his sword. Spiric is ready to execute her there and then, but a voice from his side calls him off.

He turns and is stunned to be staring at his own face. Spiric recognises it as that of the prince and the vision changes a moment later to be from the prince’s perspective, looking at Spiric, a completely different boy from the one he was now. Spiric tells the prince that the woman leaves him no choice and calls him Ozim, but Ozim orders him to hold back.

Back in the present, the walking shadows have set upon Vorric, drawn by the runes he’s using to fly and tearing away at his skin. Vorric swoops one last time at Spiric and grabs him, taking them both soaring towards the pit at the centre of the ruins. Before they reach it, Spiric manages to twist around with Byreth’s hand cannon and shoots Vorric in the gut, sending them both crashing to the edge of the pit.

As Vorric lies dying from his wound, Spiric goads him, telling him that Onassis is gone and that Vorric’s attempts to stop the anomaly Spiric’s presence is creating have failed. Unable to believe Onassis could be gone from this world, Vorric begins to doubt everything else. With a primal scream, he grabs Spiric, and the pair hurtle through the air to the surface, rock and sand parting to allow them out.

Spiric realises Vorric is now a shadow dancer, and that Vorric has just experienced pure resonance. Now so far beyond what his original purpose was, Vorric holds no hostility towards Spiric. Spiric shares that he, too, has been living a lie. He never was Spiric. He was always Prince Ozim of Andias. The Spiric from the time of The Hytharo Empire had been his sworn protector, his royal guard, and it had been a tragedy to watch him embrace the legacy of violence that the Empire was built upon.

That Spiric had never escaped Andias. But he had worked with Arallak to discover the other helixics like Ozim and formed a plan that would allow him and the other four Hytharo to escape. Desperate, hunted, and lost of all memories, he forgot his own name as Ozim and took Spiric’s instead, becoming the warrior that his guardian had once been in order to survive the harsh land he’d been thrown into. But in that time, Spiric has become more than his namesake, and more than he’d been as Ozim. Spiric is the person that those he’s met have come to know, and that’s who he’s going to continue to be.

The other four Hytharo, similarly thrown forward through time by Arallak after the fall of the Empire, will eventually emerge like he had. Spiric will have to seek them out, to help them unpick their memories and aid in the creations of new ones that will disrupt Onassis’ cycle of slaughter. But before that, he must wait for Byreth. He returns to the place he’d left her with Vorric, who offers to throw him forward through time to meet her.

Days pass in a blur as Byreth’s pace accelerates. By the time she emerges with her brother, it’s into a blazing sunset.

‘Spiric?’ Byreth said, stomping over to him. ‘Is that you?’

‘Yeah. It’s me,’ he said weakly, the second half of his words knocked from his lungs as she tackled him into one more excruciating bear hug. ‘It’s me.’