For centuries the Islands of Tangi have known peace. On his Selection Day, farm boy Tane touches the temple stone expecting a farmer's class and receives instead the fused consciousness of Lord Commander Vexaris, a general four hundred years dead who fell warning the world of an invasion that came anyway. Now the same enemy is stirring at the edge of the map, and Tane is the only soul alive who can feel it. Branded a madman, he exiles himself to the sea to prove it.
Eight books carry the war from one man's warning to a fleet at the enemy's own shore. This is progression fantasy in the vein of Cradle and He Who Fights With Monsters, where power is granted by gods with motives of their own and every gift is paid for: an earned climb, a real cost, and the lonely weight of being right too soon.
The Books
Book 1
A Ship Full of Misfits
He went to the temple stone expecting Farmer. What settles behind his ribs instead is a four-hundred-year-old general who will not stop talking, and who has already noted that the tree line hides thirty men.
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Book 2
Whatever Comes Through That Door
The birds go quiet on the ridge three hours before anything shows itself. Forty miles east, a crowded market has stopped breathing. What Tane has to answer it with is a handful of castoffs and a name no council trusts.
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Book 3
The Weave Beneath the World
Thirty-seven turns of the whale-ivory fan overhead, a folder of hull sketches gone soft at the corners, and two petitioners where the benches seat thirty. Proof was never the problem. Getting anyone to look at it is.
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Book 4
The Patience of the Tides
A boy of fourteen calls sidestepping coward's work, and half the island fights the same way. Being believed was the simple part; now the Islands must learn to lose small, and they would rather be brave.
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Book 5
The Sword on the Wall
The fish are fresh, the price is two and a half, and the seventh monitoring station has just filed the same reading as the other six. Below the temple, a gnome breaks a stricture building a scanner nobody authorised.
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Book 6
A Question Not Yet Asked
Twelve barrels cracked, forty measures of grain gone to damp, fifty rolls of bandage short. Someone wearing a borrowed face counts crates in a Vethrani supply yard, and the reef at home has gone grey.
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Book 7
The Ones Still in the Dark
After eight years of waiting to be attacked, they attack. Four hundred enemy hulls come off the approaches to meet two hundred of theirs, and what decides it is not courage but whether the fleet has eaten.
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Book 8
Just Tane
Five hundred hulls and three weeks of honest rations, roped together in the dark for a crossing no one makes in that number. Yesterday's enemy sails in the line beside them. Hold your neighbour, and hold.
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