Preface

"I only wanted to be able to sit with the children and love them and teach them to love each other. Callous, indifferent hearts, Old Gods and dragon blood and supernatural horrors. Why did they all have to find me? Why me?"

Damin is a Tamassran: a woman who cares for and educates the young within the rigidly controlled Thedosian society known as the Qun, established hundreds of years before to create a society free of misery and suffering. Secretly subverted by a rapacious supernatural horror, the Qun has become a place of grayed-out, isolated souls in which mastery, balance, and obedience are the preeminent ideals.

Fearing the withering of her own soul by the strictures placed on her people, Damin struggles alongside her half-sister Sayet and a growing coterie of wounded, disaffected Tamassran to establish a milieu within their cloistered lives to raise the children they oversee to value vulnerable and transparent relationships in a society so committed to its utilitarian principles that it no longer possesses a word for love.

This, then, is what they hope in, quietly defying the supernatural evil that seeks only to isolate and consume them. When a string of unexpected tragedies and the mysterious power in Damin's blood, the inheritance of her pagan Kossith ancestors, suddenly brings her face to face with the malignant power that has enslaved her people she inadvertently becomes a target both within the Qun and the supernatural world of the Fade.

The first of two novels, this psychological drama set in the high-fantasy world of BioWare's "Dragon Age", examines the nature of and tensions between hope and despair, judgement and compassion, isolation and love, and the way in which hope can be used to wage a hidden war in the face of overwhelming social, military, and supernatural antagonists.