Swarm and Steel
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Zerfall awakens in an alley, wounded and unable to remember her past. Chased by an assassin out into the endless wastes of the desert, she is caught, disfigured, and left for dead. Her scabbard is empty, but the need for answers—and the pull of her sword—will draw her back to the city-states.
When Jateko, a naïve youth, accidentally kills a member of his own tribe, he finds himself outcast and pursued across the desert for his crimes. Crazed from dehydration, dying of thirst and hunger, he stumbles across Zerfall.
Hunted by assassins and bound by mutual need, both Zerfall and Jeteko will confront the Täuschung, an ancient and deranged religion ruled by a broken fragment of Zerfall’s mind. Swarm, the Täuschung hell, seethes with imprisoned souls, but where gods—real or imagined—meddle in the affairs of man, the cost is high.
In Swarm and Steel, the power of belief can manifest and shape reality, and for political and religious leaders, faith becomes a powerful tool. But the insane are capable of twisting reality with their delusions as well, turning increasingly dangerous as their sanity crumbles. It is here that a long prophesied evil will be born, an endless hunger. The All Consuming will rise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fletcher's third novel set in his Manifest Delusions universe (after Beyond Redemption), a world where anything a person truly believes will become reality, is a tour de force of dark fantasy shot through with wonder and black humor. Zerfall, the charismatic leader of a religious sect, awakens with partial amnesia in an alley to learn that she has attempted to murder her sister and coleader, H lle. H lle survives, but neither of them has any idea why Zerfall made the attempt. As children, the two of them received what they believed to be a message from the divine creator and as a result they created Swarm, a hell in which souls of dead people are locked away with only one another for company forever; the sisters' church, which preaches eternal salvation on its surface, is a funnel to direct souls into Swarm. But Zerfall finds out that she has begun to doubt whether Swarm was divinely inspired and whether H lle has been working with Zerfall's best interests at heart, and even whether her sister is really her sister after all. Fletcher's twisty and continuously surprising plot piles spectacle upon spectacle in an amazingly ambitious structure, while his consistently three-dimensional characters lend depth and heart to the narrative. Some clumsiness at the beginning in explaining the world and its concepts gives way to a smoother style, without unduly marring the overall effect.
