Man Amongst the Clouds

For fifteen years, Aelo has lived in silence — raised by a scarred old man in a village too small to have a name, fed herbs every morning that suppress a power he doesn’t know he carries. He has never heard the world sing.

When the herbs fail and the silence breaks, Aelo discovers that magic is not a force to be wielded — it is a conversation with the world’s memory. And he can hear all of it.

But a king sits on an obsidian throne at the center of a dead zone, draining the memories of hundreds to feed a hunger that was born the day the world chose everyone except him. King Varas cannot hear the Song. He never could. And he has spent seventy years consuming the world to fill the silence.

Now Varas has sent his most lethal weapon — a man known only as The Knife, who carries a wooden box of five beautiful objects and checks them every night because the checking is the only act that proves he is still a person — to find the boy who made a stone sing.