Dark Star Burning, Ash Falls White by Amelie Wen Zhao EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Authors: Amelie Wen Zhao
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Diversity & Multicultural Fiction
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- Size: 7.9 MB
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Power is survival. Power is necessity. Those who seek power must
first take it; where it does not exist, they must create it.
—Unknown, Classic of Gods and Demons
Elantian Age, Cycle 12
The Northern Steppes
The ruins rose before him like a graveyard, blackened bones jutting from
the ground and gaping at a storm-gray sky.
Xan Temurezen drew to a stop. The steady crunch of his sheepskin boots
against snow fell away, and silence swept in, broken only by the distant
keening of the wind and his own heartbeat. Around him: a landscape
shrouded in white as far as the eye could see. The color of mourning. It was
as though the earth itself grieved the day a people and a civilization had died,
their last moments now buried beneath the passage of time, the turns of
cycles.
Zen held his breath as he knelt by the remains of a charred stone wall.
All the ancient tomes and scraps of maps he had studied had pointed to this
place, where the great Mansorian clan’s palace had once stood—and where
he, Xan Temurezen, its heir, had come to reclaim it.
He brushed away a mound of snow, revealing an engraved stone plaque.
He immediately recognized the swirly, linear writing as Mansorian, standing
in sharp contrast to the neat, boxlike Hin characters. Some clans, like the
Mansorians, had cultures so distinct that they had their own writing systems,
different from the standardized Hin language the Imperial Court had forced
all to adopt.Zen’s memory of the Mansorian script had faded, but he could read
enough to understand.
Palace of Eternal Peace
His hand gave a tremor; his heart tumbled in his chest. This was it: the
lost palace of his ancestors. The place from which Xan Tolürigin, the
Nightslayer, had ruled until the end of his civilization. The starting point of
Zen’s revolution.
Zen had been born two generations after the fall of the once-mighty
Mansorian clan, following the war waged by his great-grandfather Xan
Tolürigin against the Imperial Army of the Middle Kingdom. Zen’s
grandfather, then a boy, had escaped with a small faction of Mansorians and
retreated deep into the unforgiving plains of the Northern Steppes, where
they’d built a nomadic life hidden from the iron rule of the Dragon Emperor,
Yán’lóng.
That was the life Zen had known until, thirteen cycles ago, the
Imperial Army had slaughtered what was left of his clan…and then, twelve
cycles ago, when the conqueror had been conquered and the Hin had fallen to
the rule of the Elantians.
I have returned, he vowed silently to the unquiet souls who slumbered
beneath the snow. I will raise an army, and I will bring our clan back.
The snow stirred and the night pressed a little closer. And then came a
rattling whisper, like the scrape of a knife against the bone of his spine:
Army? You would call thirty or so half-fledged children an army?
It was the voice he had come to dread: the voice of his Demon God, the
being that made him powerful beyond all measure, and the creature that
embodied his shame.
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