THE COST THUS FAR – THE PRICE OF POWER RECAP

In war and love and torment, years are the measure of lifetimes.

Fourteen such years eclipsed in the time after Barodane Ironlight’s near death at the hands of Acramis the Twice-Burned, King of Scothea. While the Mad Prince helps end the second Scoth invasion of Namarr, he also taints the name of the Ironlight line by carrying out genocide against a town of innocents.

Soon after, grief over the deaths of his father and brother draws him to Digtown where it holds him in a stasis of self-imposed abuse and drug addiction until his former prosort, Garlenna Renwood, finds him. A letter from her father, Gyr, sent her in search of her supposedly dead prince.

Amid the vying of wills between the two—Garlenna seeking to return Barodane to power as he seeks nothing more than his next high on godsthorn—a turf war starts that threatens more than just their lives. Without a Crown Prince, Namarr may fracture and invite a third Scothean invasion.

Having made a vow at the feet of those he slew at the Rainy Meadows Massacre, Barodane fights for those he loves. For his friend, Meckin, the change comes too late. By the end of the conflict, a highborn lays dead alongside a half dozen masons from Breckenbright and Barodane goes with Garlenna to find his family’s banner, Solicerames.

Meanwhile, his niece, Ishoa, is at the center of seething unrest in her duchy. Long stratified to a lower caste in Anjuhk society, the Scarborn plot against Ishoa’s great-grandmother, the Ice Maiden, Belara Frost. In a gamble to secure enough votes to crush the dogmatic influence of an ideological zealot named Syphion Muul, Ishoa is thrust into the dangerous tradition of the Trials.

She’s torn between the political maneuvering of her family against the Scarborn and her feelings toward one of their scion-sons, Lodaris Warnock. Having overcome critical challenges during the Trials like the one that took the life of Stirrma Omenfaen, Ishoa and Lodaris’s feelings for one another grow, which brings about the mounting ire of the boy’s mother, Lodecka Warnock.

As a result, Lodaris meets a tragic end and Ishoa vows to exact retribution against the Warnocks and Syphion Muul. But the Scarborn and their allies are first to strike. Insurgent forces take the ducal capital of Jarik. Ishoa’s beloved uncle and mentor, Wolst, dies saving her. The last time Ishoa is seen, she has a knife at her throat, Rakeema in her arms, and a death threat in her ear.

Thephos of Carthane wanted nothing more than to die, but life has other plans. Called to Unturrus by unseen forces, Thephos joins a group of Ascendants in a ritual journey up the Mountain of Power. Before he goes, he seems to make a friend in Syn Backlegarm, the flamboyant owner of the Numbers gambling den.

Unfortunately, the warmth of ideas such as friendship is fleeting atop Unturrus. Psychoactive plants and a series of demonic interactions rip away all comforts. Thephos’s world bends around a new, horrifying reality as travel companion after travel companion meets a grisly end on Unturrus’s mysterious slopes. The Madness, a towering, foul-mouthed demon with a sickle. Hemgowwa, the Ever-Grasping Worm and its thousand hands and arms. Whispering insanity and the voided pools in the Hall of Heroes…

Having survived it all, Thephos finds himself before the Mother. And in her light, all that he was is stripped bare.

In a small town not too far from Unturrus, another Awakened is being born in order to die—though he doesn’t yet know it. However, Akyris’s grandmother, Locastrii the Mistress of Time, does. To avert the world’s encroaching oblivion, she must teach her grandson to be an Awakened. Long hours are spent under a willow tree training to stand in the River of conscious reality, a magical realm of pure creation and infinite possibilities. Gradually, Akyris opens up to the innate power he possesses, though it comes with many dangers.

With his subconscious still untrained, and a burgeoning entanglement with his half-brother siphoning his ability to control his powers, he’s nearly killed when he inadvertently clashes with Locastrii.

In order to progress beyond such harrowing events, his grandmother must finally reveal some of the truths she’s withheld. Her daughter, Tyne, has lost a son. Akyris finds out why he trains and who they must fight against—Siddaia, the Arrow of Light. The mirror is held up before Akyris only for him to discover that he and his enemy are one and the same.

War and love and torment…

Its beginning and end draws near.