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Murderer of Dreams
Book One of the Dream Murderer Cycle
by Paul Taffinder
The stars fell.
The oceans boiled and flooded the land.
A darkness descended.
ECHREXAR murdered our dreams
There was a time, before the breaking of the Golden Age of the world, when the peoples were as the birds of the air – of a thousand forms – and each of the thousand spoke no single tongue. Until Echrexar, the eater of a million million souls. Echrexar laid waste the land and the sea and darkened the skies so that the people were nearly no more. But the 10,000 Immortals saved the people in their refuges. And it was the black-robed Exarchs of the Faith, sent forth from the whitestone pyramid temple at Cise Hook, who gave them the archives and the teachings.
Eslin grew up with a small band of survivors beneath the permafrost of the deep Svalbard refuge, thrown back into an in-between time of perpetual darkness and grim survival underground. As the world recovers, it has entered a new Dark Age of dream wanderers who foretell the future, fanatics of the Faith and, among the old fortresses, internecine purges between the Lords of Kiangsu Realm. In this febrile empire, Eslin has found a new role as Skava, the spymaster of the once-powerful Kingdom of Honam, fired by a passionate intensity to rebuild the world and all its dreams. Working in the shadows, she must re-unite the old kingdoms and consolidate her power. But she has a terrible secret, both curse and blessing: she is one of the last of the Immortals. Her ancient enemies know it and they have found her again. Harbin of the Hundred Islands and the assassin Kesmet are on her trail, together with the brutal Hunters of Heretics, pursuing her through the deep forests and across the snow-capped High Alnaes mountains.
In this battle for the future, only one side can triumph.
Conjured on an epic scale, Murderer of Dreams is a brilliantly original portrayal of a post-apocalyptic dominion of nobles, spies, zealots and assassins whose passions, conspiracies and predatory ambitions have sprung twisted from the mythology of a destroyed world.
The Dream Murderer Cycle
More books from this author
Psychologist, strategist and award-winning author Paul Taffinder lives in the UK, near London. So fascinated was he as a boy by the underlying motivations of people – the good, the bad and the vile – that he completed three degrees and then a PhD in psychology and still found out that there was a lot to learn. Accordingly he has worked in the deepest mines and travelled to the highest places on earth, by flying Concorde (as a passenger, not a pilot). He is a devotee of fantasy and science fiction because it is a celebration of human possibilities. With four acclaimed business books to his name, he course corrected and created his own world in his debut trilogy The Dream Murderer Cycle.
