Blurb:
It’s been six months since Keiran left his greatest enemy stranded on one of Manoch’s moons, six months of feverish work preparing for the lich’s seemingly inevitable return. Keiran is gathering allies and resources, and working to strengthen himself as much as possible.
But when he hits a bottleneck just one step short of finally regaining his full power, never mind solving it before Ammun returns, he’s not sure he’ll be able to solve it, ever. Distractions abound as payments come due for past aid, an order of archmages takes an unhealthy interest in his activities, and friendships begin to fracture under the weight of both Keiran’s responsibilities and his secrets.
Can he survive the crushing weight of a lich clad in a moon’s full power bearing down on him, or will he be washed away in the flood?
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Summary of book 4:
After two years of effort, Keiran’s plan to create a petrified forest of living stone comes to fruition. It’s now producing incalculable amounts of mana and he’s ready to bind the valley as his genius loci to finish his mana core’s ascension to stage six. The ritual goes off smoothly, and he heads to the town he helped his family establish, New Alkerist, to celebrate.
After enjoying an evening with his parents, his sister, and his new little brother, Nailu, Keiran is about to leave when a force of armed warriors teleports onto the town platform. Far from being hostile, they’re refugees from a coastal town near the tower that fled by ship. Ammun’s mages are attacking everybody, driving people out of towns or killing them and stealing food and supplies. Keiran takes a day to help get the refugees integrated on a peninsula hidden behind the mountains that they’ve settled on, then starts actively poking around Ralvost.
What is finds is that Ammun is reclaiming the land controlled by the old empire with military force, and that, more importantly, there are secret facilities beyond even that border that are getting shipments of mysterious components. Keiran lays a series of divinations throughout the countryside in the hopes of finding one of these shipments and tracing it to its delivery site.
When he returns home, it’s to find a message from Keeper, former records keeper of the Wolf Pack cabal, wanting to talk to him. She’s discovered some passages in old books indicating that the city of Derro has a large quantity of mysteel buried deep underground, originally used as part of its infrastructure. Keiran needs this to patch up the broken shell around the world core, and pays Keeper for the info before descending underground to salvage it.
What he finds instead are thousands of giant sand worms, all intent on consuming any source of mana they can reach. After fighting his way through, Keiran eventually discovers the cache of mysteel in the form of an enormous pillar. It has layers and layers of metal wrapped around it, each one carved with tens of thousands of runes. They were designed to empower the city with all sorts of functions, not in the least of which was protecting it.
He also finds a dormant golem, one made of a strange material he doesn’t recognize. Keiran relocates the pillar—along with all of its smaller companion pieces—and the golem back to his demesne to research them further. After modifying the pillars to work in conjunction with his own wards, Keiran then examines the golem and determines it has an incredibly complex personality matrix, so detailed that it acts like a living person.
He wakes the golem up by feeding it mana, and it introduces itself as Querit. He is a research golem that was active a thousand years ago when the world broke, who then shut down after being starved of mana. Keiran quickly puts the golem to work in exchange for the mana he needs to survive, and his new assistant proves most capable.
Keiran’s spying on Ammun’s lands bears fruit. He discovers not only the facility that deliveries are being made to, but that there are eight of them total. Each one is building some sort of complicated machine, one that has something to do with spatial magic and which is incredibly delicate. Working with Querit, he constructs mobile bomb golems that can be remotely piloted. They sneak one into each facility and destroy the machines, hoping to set back Ammun’s plans.
In the process, Querit comes under attack, but he manages to hold the group of mages that found him off long enough for Keiran to intervene. Their mission accomplished, the pair retreat back to Keiran’s demesne to plan their next move.
Keiran wants to advance his core again, but to do that, he needs to find a mana resonance point. With mana having disappeared from the world, he doesn’t believe any natural points remain. Querit agrees with that assessment, but suggests that he can help Keiran build an artificial one instead. The catch is that they need to go digging under Derro to find an archive owned by Querit’s creator in order to find the knowledge needed.
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While they’re down there, Keiran has a realization about the sand worms. They’re much bigger than Querit remembers them being, and they have to have a source of mana to feed on. Keiran theorizes that a piece of the shattered moon’s core struck Derro, leaving the massive crater he’s already explored, and that a thousand years ago, the sand worms dragged the actual core farther underground, where they’ve been feeding off it ever since.
That much mana would be incredibly valuable in creating an artificial resonance point, and Keiran devises a plan to feed scrying beacons to the sand worms to track their movements in the hope that they’ll lead him to the core. Querit recovers the books he wants while Keiran works on creating the beacons needed.
Soon after, a group of Ammun’s mage hunters attack the valley. Their attempt fails utterly, and they are quickly killed or captured. He interrogates one of the mages and discovers that Ammun is attempting to build some sort of tether system that will link him to the tower, allowing him to roam anywhere inside the circle of the eight facilities without worrying about running out of mana.
Keiran traces the mage hunters entry to the island back to one of the brakvaw portals and goes there to shut it down, much to the consternation of Grandfather and the elder council. Unwilling to leave an open portal for his enemies to use, Keiran closes it anyway. Then he begins making plans to fortify New Alkerist, plans which include removing the island-wide teleportation platform network to prevent the enemy from using it.
While Keiran fortifies the island, Querit is hard at work researching both the designs of Ammun’s machines they gained from interrogating prisoners and adapting lossless casting to give himself an infinite source of mana. Ideally, he wants to expand his research to perpetual enchantments and inscriptions as well, but that requires more work.
With everything else taken care of for the moment, Keiran follows up on his search for a buried moon core. He goes digging deep under Derro, miles down, where the sand worms are so big they could swallow him whole. Instead of finding the moon core, he finds a colony of ants gifted in mind magic who’ve formed a gestalt entity. Keiran quickly strikes a deal with the gestalt that involves relocating its colony to the brakvaw eyrie, where it will keep an eye on the portals using its divinations in exchange for unlimited food and the location of the moon core.
After handling that transaction, Keiran finishes his delve. He finds the broken chunk of moon core nestled in the coils of a massive, multi-mile long sand worm. After killing the monster, he extracts the core from its clutches and takes it to the valley, where he harnesses its mana-producing capabilities to increase his demesne’s rate of production even further. Soon, he and Querit are ready to forge their artificial mana resonance point.
Just as they complete it, Ammun’s forces launch their second attack. Ammun himself makes a brief appearance via a portal and breaks Keiran’s wards, allowing mages to swarm the valley. Keiran and Querit fight them off, killing all of them but leaving Keiran too exhausted to retaliate. He speculates that Ammun must have found a way to spy on them in order to time the attack so well.
Querit realizes that during his own fight months ago, one of the mages tagged him with a sympathetic scrying rune and piggybacks on the magic to turn it into a two-way viewing. Keiran gains access to the diviners’ hall in Ammun’s tower, where he kills close to a hundred of the mages and frees several dozen more. They tell him about the secret project in the heart of a hollowed-out mountain.
Before Keiran can follow up on that, Ammun sends his next distraction to New Alkerist. A massive skeletal dragon arrives via portal, shepherded by none other than Averin, the master mage who worked to revive Ammun back in the tower. Keiran fights the dragon off, killing Averin in the process, then returns to the valley.
They determine that they still have some time before Ammun finishes harnessing a moon to use as a weapon like the rebel cabal did a thousand years ago. Keiran uses that window to finally advance his core to stage seven and gains the ability to use heavy mana in his spells. Fully empowered now, he takes the fight to Ammun’s hidden mountain, where he destroys the undead dragon completely before entering the sanctum inside the summit.
There he finds the place empty but for a massive ritual chamber that he determines is an ultra-long-range teleportation spell that can take a group of people all the way to the surface of the moon. Using the ritual construct as a base, he pars it down to operate on a single person: him.
Once he arrives, Keiran quickly realizes that Ammun can’t make the magic work on his own. He couldn’t figure out how to do what Keiran did, and if Keiran takes the group of mages Ammun has left in the moon base back down to the planet, Ammun will have no way home. After sending them away, he tracks Ammun down in a cave network under the moon’s surface.
After catching up to the lich, Keiran realizes Ammun’s true goal. It’s not to turn the moon into a weapon. It’s to embed his phylacerty in the moon core to create a permanent connection to it as a source of mana. Ammun will be able to go anywhere on the planet with no fear of getting too far from his phylactery and starving himself of mana. He’ll have an unlimited amount of mana to cast spells at the same time. Even if he’s defeated, he’ll simply grow a new body far out of anyone’s reach.
Ammun and his golem, Ergl, attack and overpower Keiran. Unfamiliar with the strange gravity and needing things like air to survive, Keiran loses the fight and activates his emergency recall, which he’s retooled to take him back to the moon base. Ergl, who is grappling Keiran at the time the spell goes off, ends up coming along for the ride. Without its master to help, the golem is unable to defeat Keiran and detonates its core as a mana bomb to in an attempt to kill Keiran.
Keiran survives, but is now injured, exhausted, and out of mana. He concedes Ammun’s victory, but, knowing that the lich can’t return to Manoch on his own, destroys the moon base and teleports back down to the planet’s surface. As soon as Keiran recovers, he gets to work adapting the ultra-long-range portion of the ritual into scrying mirrors to keep an eye on what Ammun’s doing up there, just in case, and begins planning the final steps to regaining his lost power in preparation for their inevitable final confrontation.