Across the world more shadows gathered. A grieving queen would not give up the search for her lost king. An ambitious child sought to exceed the fame of her bloody father. A loyal warrior searched for the Speaker’s lost consort. A peerless bounty hunter stalked a hidden criminal. And entangled in the ghostly expanse of the Silent Vale, a scholar courted madness by trying to fathom a secret left behind by gods.

Of all these shadows, the longest and darkest was cast by a faceless, nameless being, delivered to death’s very doorstep. Cursed with a life he loathed, he must choose between oblivion and blessed obscurity, or glory and the endless terror of discovery.

Finally, one other had gone abroad to meet his destiny. Older than the trees, he followed in the footprints of the gods, striving to decipher the shadows they left behind five thousand years earlier. He intended that no one and nothing would stand in his way. Kingdoms and nations, the lives of thousands, were nothing compared to his final goal: eternity itself. The sun rose. Only the deepest shadows could remain.

Chapter 1

No breath of breeze stirred among the trees. A dense canopy of leaves, parched by summer heat until they were brittle as glass, cast a perpetual shade on the forest floor. Although excluded, the sun made its presence felt. The air in the forest was stiflingly hot and still as a tomb. Birds did not sing, and nothing moved that could avoid moving.

A trail no wider than a horse’s hips was worn through the underbrush. It wound up hills and down hollows, following no discernible path. At an uncommonly straight stretch, the path ran along the foot of a hill, between a pair of lofty ash trees. The hill comprised shelves of broken slate, terraced down like a timeworn staircase to disintegrate at last into the dust of the narrow path.