Showing results by author "Derek Prior" in All Categories

Centuries ago, the Isle of Branikdür was mysteriously abandoned by the ruling Hélum Empire. Ever since, rival clans have battled for supremacy at the bidding of their sacred sorcerers. During the once-a-year armistice for the Festival of Proving, the gifted warrior Snaith Harrow aims to leave his mark in the fight circles before marrying his childhood sweetheart. But following a freak accident, he discovers a terrible secret about the girl he loves.

It was the place they stored the junk no one wanted anymore: discarded toys, baby clothes, and ancient secrets from forgotten generations. But when contagion turns Wesley Harding's world insane, and horror enters his home, the attic is the last place left to hide. At nine years old, he finds himself alone in the dark, amid heaped-up piles of the familiar and the unknown. Gunshots and howls punctuate the thunderstorm outside. Crashes and groans come from below.

Captured by the survivors of his massacre at Arx Gravis, the Nameless Dwarf is sentenced to die. The assassin Ilesa has abandoned him, and so it falls to the ex-rogue Nils and Silas the sorcerer to stage a rescue. But with the Lich Lord's grimoire obsessing him more and more, Silas suspects he is no longer in control of his own fate. Sick and close to death, he is drawn on by visions of a black staff within a forest of tar.

When the dwarven civil war ended, the Nameless Dwarf lay cold upon the battlefield, his broken axe beside him. But death is not the end in a cosmos ruled by the Supernals, beings of pure sorcery with the power to create worlds. Nameless finds himself aboard a ship bound for the Feasting Hall of Witandos, but disappointment, rather than beer, awaits him, along with a mountain of unpaid penance.

Having worked out his penance and resettled his people in the citadel of Arnoch, the Nameless Dwarf decides to start a new life in the up-and-coming town of Brink. Seven years later, he has everything a dwarf could possibly wish for - a gym, a beer hall, and a bawdy house across the road. Then a blood-stained dwarf staggers into town with a message of doom: Arnoch has sunk beneath the waves, its last defense against the attack of a five-headed dragon.

Snuv Scavage is about as lowborn as a dwarf can get. With no parents and no home, she tends Arnoch’s battle-goats and sleeps in their pen. But there is something special about this dwarf. Something written in her blood. When disturbing reports come in from the city of Jeridium, Snuv is sent to kill the heavily pregnant Skald, Nyra Sahtis, before she can give birth to her unnatural child. But Nyra is watched over by the Church of the Way, whose priests have changed beyond all recognition. And she enjoys the protection of Caelin the Cleaver, the most deadly warrior of her generation.

A babe is born in the shadows of the ravine city, a child who will end the self-imposed exile of the dwarves and usher in a new age of glory. Years later, Ravine Guard Carnac Thayn discovers a break-in at the Scriptorium. A dwarf has been murdered and a book stolen, but the ruling council do nothing. Then, when Carn is called to investigate thuds and crashes from the mines, old horror rises from the deep, and the city is threatened with slaughter.

The only thing keeping the Nameless Dwarf from once more becoming the Ravine Butcher is a helm made from the sorcerous ore, ocras, which he can never remove. Without the helm, he would succumb to the power of the black axe that caused the slaughter at Arx Gravis. After a year of fighting in other people’s wars, Nameless receives a visit from one of the underworld tricksters - a faen - who tells him the day he has long waited for has arrived: The philosopher Aristodeus has come up with a plan to destroy the black axe and free Nameless from the ocras helm.

Awakened from an induced year-long slumber, the nameless dwarf is tortured by memories of slaughter and must come to terms with who he has become: an outcast, a butcher, the most reviled of dwarven-kind.

When a bloodthirsty horde storms out of the north, refugees flee for their lives, among them the skald Nyra Sahtis and Sister Caelin, a priestess who was once a trainer of armies. But with the capital, Jeridium, under siege from a second incursion, there is nowhere left to run. As rival armies converge on Jeridium, the Senate are reduced to clutching at straws. In a desperate last gambit, they send the assassin Shadrak the Unseen past enemy lines and into the mountains, where he must find a grief-stricken warrior and his mythical axe.

Alone, bereft, and unable to forgive himself for the slaughter at the ravine, the Nameless Dwarf swears to do one last thing, even if it kills him: With Nils Fargin, the son of a Jeridium guild lord as his guide, Nameless pursues the survivors among the dwarves, hoping to convince them that the curse of the Black Axe has been lifted from him and they are safe to return home. The trail leads to the town of Malfen - a nest of cutthroats and the gateway to Cerreth, the Land of Nightmare, which would be suicide for the dwarves to enter.

The dwarves have captured Nameless and left the Axe of the Dwarf Lords abandoned on the shore of the serpent’s lake. With Ilesa gone, it’s down to Nils and Silas to stage a rescue, but first they’ll have to stop squabbling and find something they can agree on. Meanwhile, the legendary prevarication of the dwarven Council of Twelve is under threat from a people grown tired of indecision. The survivors of the Ravine Butcher’s massacre want their pound of flesh.

When the wolf-men attack and the companions are split up, Nameless and Ilesa find themselves marooned on an island at the center of a newly formed lake. With the dwarf unable to swim, and a monstrous serpent patrolling the water, it's down to Ilesa to get them back to shore. But can she be trusted, what with the bounty on Nameless' head and her long history of betrayal?

An exemplary knight and veteran of a horrific battle against the undead armies of the Lich Lord, Deacon Shader must compete for his Order's highest office and attempt to become the Keeper of the Sword of the Archon. Succeed or fail, he plans to desert the Order and become a contemplative monk on the far side of the world. The transition is not a smooth one, and Shader, a deserter, is hunted by the religious authorities he used to serve.