The Vault of Echoes

A two-hour novella set three hundred years before the Spellblade series begins. Grandmaster Theron Brightforge is dead in the Blighted Wastes, and so are the forty who went down there with him. Infernus the Eternal is sealed. His army is not. Cecily Dymoke comes home to Stormhold alone, up four hundred years of worn steps, with a mule, a dead man's sword she has not been able to touch since the Wastes, and nine field books nobody expected. Twelve days. One hundred and eighty-six people. A citadel it would take four hundred Spellblades to hold and forty-one to lose. So they do not hold it. They empty it, and in the days they have left the last people alive who know how a Spellblade is made go down under the mountain and build something for a stranger who has not been born: a room, a narrative cut into the rock, three trials nobody will be there to mark, and a door that opens for one kind of person and no other. Every hour spent below is an hour not spent on the walls. Every object that goes into the chests is a judgment about somebody none of them will ever meet. The Order will not survive the month. That was never the question. A complete, self-contained story, and the entrance to the Spellblade series.