First Glimpses of the World

For ten thousand years, the world has worshipped four Elemental Goddesses — Light, Wind, Water, and Fire. It has forgotten there was ever a fifth.

The Sifang World was woven from seven powers, four of them guarded by goddesses still revered today. But the fifth element — Life — and the goddess who watches over it have slipped out of every legend, out of memory itself.

Now a seal two thousand years old is failing. The Elves — long believed extinct — were never gone at all: they have been hiding in the Underworld, and now they are rising again with the Dark Power at their backs. At last the Celestial Goddess confesses the truth she has kept for an age: the missing Goddess of Life never left the Mortal World.

She lives in the Mingyue Forest as Lin — a white-robed princess, a peerless commander, and a woman who no longer remembers who she truly is. She has buried the one she loved and razed a city in her grief, and she believes in nothing gentle anymore.

To bring her home, the four sisters of Light, Wind, Water, and Fire journey into the haunted woods. But finding her is the easy part. The harder task is making a goddess who has forgotten herself want to remember — and choose to return.

It is a tale of memory, of belonging, and of whether kindness is a weakness or a strength. And the storm now breaking over the Sifang World was set in motion long ago, in the Celestial Realm, by two twin angels whose ancient feud consumed each other — and an entire world.

Such are the first glimpses of the world — and the question it leaves: will the forgotten goddess come home?