Rays Of The Sunset

The Five Kingdoms — Volkar, Meyhar, Chernoval, Solis, and Ishold — have long been bound by an uneasy truce, but that peace is wearing thin under the weight of old grudges and unchecked ambition.

Once every thirty years, warriors from each kingdom meet in the capital of Shilan to settle, through a single brutal contest, who will hold power over them all. With the next Great Battle approaching, King Severin of Volkar is grooming his chosen fighter, willing to pay any price to reclaim his kingdom's former standing.

Yet swords alone don't decide how the story gets told.

Hidden away among ruins few remember, the chronicler Yar — his body broken, his mind sharp — pieces together the true history of his world. A strange ring lets him slip into the memories of others, living again through the eyes of kings and criminals alike.

While Severin wages war against barbarian raiders, his son Borin abandons his claim to the throne entirely. Chasing a forbidden map and the half-remembered stories of an aunt who never returned from the sea, he builds a ship — the Iris — and sets his course for the uncharted West, a place no traveler has ever come back from.

Elsewhere, the exiled blacksmith Igor, the ruthless hired blades Sylvia and Riven, and the enigmatic Jasmine, who watches the world unfold from behind her own walls, find their separate roads bending toward one another — in a story of betrayal, survival, and the cost of uncovering the truth.

What does Yar witness, when the sun goes down at last?