Ravi has left Tiverius with Dana, who knows far more than she will tell him about the mysterious people who have rekindled interest in the coastal “Gathering” movement.
Tylve is an adherent of this movement as her family has been through the generations. She doesn’t understand the influx of new people. Since fleeing her village after her home was searched, she has arrived in the City of Glass, where a fateful meeting brings her in contact with a spy.
Meanwhile, Kotori has gone to investigate the “lights in the sky” that he’s kept secret for over twenty years. One fell down to the surface and he desperately needs to justify why he’s never said anything about his suspicions before.
He’s the Aranian court astrologer and if his suspicions are right, literally everything he’s been taught–and he’s told others–about the stars and star signs is wrong.
Milena from the “Hive” and six others were abroad the capsule that crashed to the surface of the world. Now she and her two surviving companions need to make their way to the other settlers in a hostile landscape where the locals can’t find out who they are. They confiscate a truck, but the only one who knows how to operate it is a local old man.
It’s only a matter of time before the people on the ground discover who they are and what’s worse, what their plans are and what’s chasing them.
Snippet from the book:
There were two types of people in Arania who were bestowed the dubious honour of meeting the Mother: prisoners and royalty.
The prisoners were sent out on the ocean, locked in cages on the deck of a crowded vessel. They would be barely clothed, and would not be fed on board, because why bother?
After the ship had crossed into the zone where the Mother loomed as a giant striped ball in the sky, where the prisoners would become ill, when their skin blistered and their insides turned to water, after they bled out and died in their cages while the ship’s crew sat in a cabin wearing protective clothing, their bodies would be wrapped up in cloth and taken to the south coast to be burned.
By contrast, royalty only met the Mother when they were already dead.
A specially constructed and decked out royal ship would carry just the body and nothing else. The ship had no anchor and only limited means to control its course. It would travel in the company of a second ship, and once they were at the destination where living people could no longer travel, not even when wearing protective suits, the crew would hoist the sails and fix them in a position that would take the ship further over the horizon, and then they would board the longboat to make their way back to the second ship and farewell the king’s vessel as it disappeared over the horizon.
That was the process about to take place in the Aranian capital.
On this day, after his recent passing, all citizens of Kadrish, from the highborn to the most lowly workers, had gathered in the harbour to pay their final respects to King Orik, who had passed away from old age two days ago, and to farewell him on his final journey.
Workers and children had been given the day off. Nobles and merchants wore their finery. Shops were closed. The stalls had been taken from the marketplace. All soldiers stationed in the capital and those who could travel there had been summoned to attend, to line the route the king’s bier would take through the city, to fire the salute, to fly the flags, to sing the hymns with their solemn voices that echoed over the market, in the streets, over the harbour and all the way to the Citadel that overlooked the city, where the king’s empty chair by the window in his private room witnessed the spectacle.
Lana had known for a long time that this day would come. Even when she formally married Orik, he was both much older than she was, and much older than the age of the average citizen of Kadrish. The royal funeral vessel had lain in the harbour for years, picked out and decorated by King Orik himself.
For years, she had planned and prepared for this day, and now it was here, she felt more unprepared than ever.
