Winner of the Literary Titan Gold Award and five star review. Before they were myths, they were history. Rewind the clock to the dawn of the world. No knights, no castles-only a brutal, prehistoric epoch where the gods, monsters, and ancient races of our legends were simply flesh-and-blood beings fighting to survive an unforgiving landscape. Ashwyn is an Albah. In ten thousand years, oral tradition will exaggerate his people into the "elves" of myth, but today, he is just a weary ranger wandering a continent that is growing wild and empty around him. His solitary vigil shatters when he encounters a traumatized boy in the ruins of a massacred village. The attackers were not mere raiders; they are the ghosts of a forgotten sin that permanently unbalanced the universe, proving that no action escapes consequence. Bound to the boy, Ashwyn sets this tinderbox world alight. Their journey will take them from the freezing western highlands, across the violent steppes, and into the humid jungles of the mythic East, where the last untouched remnants of ancient shamanism still grow. Beneath an endless canopy, Ashwyn must face the living reflection of his own people. Somewhere at the end of this turn of the Wheel waits a devastating choice only he can make: buy a little more life for his fading kind, or surrender the earth to the relentless flood of the Strangers from the South-a young, unstoppable species that calls itself 'human.' Out of the dead, the living are grown.