Wayne Mitchell drove long-haul out of Broken Hill for forty years. Then a bushfire took his rig, his body, and his whole life, and something on the far side of the smoke offered him a job no truckie was ever meant to hold: god of travellers, on the scorching continent of Kethara, where a caravan of two hundred desperate souls needs someone who knows how to get the load through.
The Travellers of the Dust is progression fantasy for readers of Cradle and He Who Fights With Monsters, run on a divine economy instead of a system: every prayer feeds Wayne, every miracle spends him. There is no prophecy, no chosen one, and no dark lord. There is the desert, the oasis politics, and the long road to earned godhood. Eight books, complete.
The Books
Book 1
Dustwalker
Forty years of hauling freight end in a wall of fire. He wakes on cold stone in a dying god's shrine, wearing a body built from memory, with forty-seven wagons out in the sand and a storm closing.
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Book 2
The Primer
Three prayers arrive in the same heartbeat: one caravan attacked, one sick, one stranded with a split axle. Three problems, one god, no triage system, and nobody who will explain how this is meant to work.
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Book 3
The Foundation
He unrolls the drawings and names it out loud: a permanent city, walls and water and trade roads. Then the storehouse count comes back ninety percent short, and every sack of grain has to cross open desert.
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Book 4
The Rest
Stone dust before sunrise, a cracked tool belt, blisters. Today the walls go up, and he means to raise them the way any mason would, because a city built on miracles only stands as long as its god.
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Book 5
The Strike
A ledger lands on his desk and the numbers do not sit right. So he pulls on a traveller's coat, walks two days out to a waystation, and counts the thinning grain sacks himself.
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Book 6
The Coalition
The gate was built three wagons wide. Four hundred people are coming through it, the registration ledger will not hold their names, and the latrine trenches have about two days before the fever finds a way to spread.
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Book 7
The Sands
In front of the whole Divine Council, Keth turns an indestructible table to sand. The water table starts falling an inch an hour, and out on the safest road on the continent, twelve wagons stop being there.
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Book 8
The Road
The last pin goes into the map and the network is finished. Then three thousand strangers come ashore in forty-one broken ships, and the road he spent seven years building has nowhere left to go but water.
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