Dark Star Burning, Ash Falls White (Song of the Last Kingdom, Band 2) - Softcover

Zhao, Amélie Wen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593487575 ISBN 13: 9780593487570

Verlag: Random House Children's Books, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic sequel to the book Song of Silver, Flame Like Night, is a fast-paced, riveting YA fantasy inspired by the mythology and folklore of ancient China.

The Demon Gods have risen. Skies’ End has fallen to the colonizers. And Lan and Zen have chosen sides.

But they will not fight together.

Though Lan inherited the power of the Silver Dragon, she understands the path she must take. She believes the Demon Gods to be the cause of war, conflict, and turmoil, and that the future of the Last Kingdom depends on their being eliminated forever. Worse, she knows that if the Elantians manage to bind one of the legendary beings, their army will be unstoppable. To save her kingdom and her people, Lan will need to find the only mythical weapon capable of destroying the Demon Gods: the Godslayer.

Zen is sure that the only way to free the Last Kingdom is to use the power of the Demon Gods. When he bound the Black Tortoise, he paid the ultimate price: to inherit its strength, he will forfeit his body, his mind, and his soul. Yet one Demon God is not enough against the might of the colonizers. In the ruins of the northern Mansorian lands slumbers a magical army of demonic practitioners capable of facing off against the Elantians—but Zen must find the Seal to awaken them to fight by his side.

At the center of both Lan’s and Zen’s journeys is one city: Shaklahira, a former stronghold of the Imperial Court that vanished without a trace when the Elantians invaded. Its location is a mystery, and both are sure that it holds the answers they need, but the past it hides might be more dangerous than anything they’ve faced yet.

The battle for the Last Kingdom rages on. But to win the war, Lan will have to decide: Can she face the boy she loves again? And when she does, can she kill him to free her people?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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 and its sequel, Dark Star Burning, Ash Falls White.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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 against the Imperial Army of the Middle Kingdom. Zen’s grandfather, then a boy, had escaped with a small faction of Mansorians and retreated deep into the unforgiving plains of the Northern Steppes, where they’d built a nomadic life hidden from the iron rule of the Dragon Emperor, Yan’long. That was the life Zen had known until, thirteen cycles ago, the Imperial Army had slaughtered what was left of his clan . . . and then, twelve cycles ago, when the conqueror had been conquered and the Hin had fallen to the rule of the Elantians.

I have returned, he vowed silently to the unquiet souls who slumbered beneath the snow. I will raise an army, and I will bring our clan back.

The snow stirred and the night pressed a little closer. And then came a rattling whisper, like the scrape of a knife against the bone of his spine: Army? You would call thirty or so half-fledged children an army?

It was the voice he had come to dread: the voice of his Demon God, the being that made him powerful beyond all measure, and the creature that embodied his shame. In the world of practitioning, demonic practitioning was dangerous and forbidden; the masters at his school who had raised him had taught him why.

Zen had betrayed everything he knew and loved in order to gain the power of the Black Tortoise.

Pushing those thoughts away, Zen turned to the small caravan of people following him. They, too, had stopped and stood huddled together in the cold, their long, pale robes made for the temperate winters of the south, not for the harsh northern climate. These were disciples of what had once been the School of the White Pines, the last-standing ancient Hin school of practitioning, where Zen had grown up. Less than one moon ago, it had fallen in an all-out battle against the Elantian Army and its powerful Royal Magicians.

The school’s disciples had evacuated first, escaping to safety over hidden mountain trails and through forests that led away from the east, where Elantian occupation held strong. It hadn’t been difficult to track them down. That night, as Zen had been prepared to flee from Where the Rivers Flow and the Skies End once and for all, he’d picked up on their qi. He’d sensed their grief, their absolute terror at having lost their home and their entire way of life.

It had struck a chord, a memory buried deep.

A boy, not eleven cycles old, wading through the burnt feathergrasses of his homeland, weeping and alone.

When Zen had found the disciples, he’d made them an offer: pledge their allegiance and join his rebellion in exchange for his protection.

With all but two of their masters killed and their former home destroyed, all the disciples, just children and teens, had agreed. Even two former masters--Nur of the Light Arts and the Nameless Master of Assassins--had followed.

Zen wasn’t certain why he’d made the offer. It would have been foolish of him to believe that a group of so few practitioners, most only half-trained, would be the army to take down the Elantian Empire.

No, Zen thought, turning back to the ruins of the Palace of Eternal Peace: the army he sought lay buried somewhere deep inside, along with the bones and magic of his people.

Growing up, he’d heard whispers, among those of his clan who were left, of a fearsome army of riders Xan Tolurigin had led, who were powerful beyond imagination--and summoned by magic. It was said the Nightslayer had led these riders to defeat entire clans, to conquer whole territories and shape the Mansorians into one of the most powerful clans in history, second only to the imperial family. Zen remembered late nights curled up in wools inside his yurt, the firelight outside flickering against the walls and outlining the shadows of the adults who sat around the fire, whispering in half awe, half fear. The faithful riders of Xan Tolurigin still existed, they murmured, and could be awakened with a certain magic, one so dangerous and powerful that only Xan Tolurigin had been able to use it with the help of his Demon God.

Now Zen had inherited his great-grandfather’s Demon God; he would find and raise this legendary army and declare war against the Elantians. And if there were any traces of the secrets and old magic Xan Tolurigin had used to summon his army, they would be found within the collective tomb of his people and his heritage.

Zen had thought it through: he would target the Royal Magicians first. The strategy was an old Mansorian war proverb: The viper is only as venomous as its fangs. The Elantians were only as powerful as their magicians. Take them out, and the entire army would be crippled.

Zen cast his gaze about the group of disciples, knowing that, no matter how many times he searched, he would not find the only face he sought. Pebble-bright eyes, curved in mischief; smile-tinged lips like flower petals; chin-length hair like black silk that shifted when she turned to gaze at him.

Pain cut across his chest, followed by the torrent of memories and crushing grief that came with any thought of her. The black-glass lake, swallowing the light of the stars. Lan, standing on the same shore yet a thousand lǐ away in that moment, betrayal filling her eyes when she learned of his bargain with the Black Tortoise.

Please, Zen, don’t choose this.

And he’d uttered the words that cleaved their path in two, once and for all: If you are not with me, then you are against me.

Zen ground his nails into his palms, dragging himself back to the present. “Shan’jun.” His voice cut through the whistling wind. At the front of the line, a disciple turned to him, a young man around the same age as Zen. His slim face, once smooth...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Children's Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593487575
• ISBN 13: 9780593487570
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: EMBER; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/imprints/EM/ember; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar