Mercenary. Galactic traveler. Survivor. Earl Dumarest is all those things - and more. For he claims to come from the mythical planet of Earth. And those claims have just attracted the attention of the sinister Cyclan. Stranded on Gath with no way off, Dumarest becomes embroiled in the schemes of a sadistic prince and a dying matriarch. Plots within plots unfold. Dumarest is the key to their success. For amid the schemes of prince and matriarch alike, all have come to experience the legendary Winds of Gath.

Once a student of alchemy with the dark scholars of the Technic League, Alaeron fled their arcane order when his conscience got the better of him, taking with him a few strange devices of unknown function. Now in hiding in a distant city, he's happy to use his skills creating minor potions and wonders - at least until the back-alley rescue of an adventurer named Jaya lands him in trouble with a powerful crime lord.

The Guild of Navigators has ruled the Aion Sea for centuries, using their fleet of mystical ships to collect trade for the Aurelian Empire. Now, the Emperor is dead. For Calder Marten, Captain of The Testament, the Emperor’s death is not an end, but an opportunity. He and his crew seek the legendary Heart of Nakothi, an artifact that could raise a second Emperor...and earn Calder a fortune. But they’re not the only ones who want the Heart. The Consultant’s Guild, an ancient order of spies and assassins, will stop at nothing to keep the world in chaos.

After years of searching for the next Avatar, the four nations have found peace with Avatar Yun - until Kyoshi, Yun’s friend and servant, demonstrates remarkable bending abilities herself. With the identity of the true Avatar at stake, Kyoshi and her fiery friend Rangi flee the Avatar mansion and find supporters in the daofei - outlaws living in the shadows of the Earth Kingdom. But while Kyoshi, Rangi, and their daofei friends face off against underworld rivals, those who seek to control the Avatar draw close.

Most of the time the Moontide Bridge lies deep below the sea, but every 12 years the tides sink and the bridge is revealed, its gates open for trade. The Magi are hell-bent on ruling this new world, and for the last two Moontides they have led armies across the bridge on "crusades of conquest". Now, the third Moontide is almost here, and this time the people of the East are ready for a fight... but it is three seemingly ordinary people that will decide the fate of the world.

Gods are forbidden in the kingdom of Middren. Formed by human desires and fed by their worship, there are countless gods in the world—but after a great war, the new king outlawed them and now pays “godkillers” to destroy any who try to rise from the shadows. As a child, Kissen saw her family murdered by a fire god. Now, she makes a living killing them and enjoys it. But all this changes when Kissen is tasked with helping a young noble girl with a god problem. The child’s soul is bonded to a tiny god of white lies, and Kissen can’t kill it without ending the girl’s life too.

When Phoebe, goddess of the moon, is killed by the knights of the sun god, Hyperion, all who follow her are branded heretics. With Phoebe gone, the souls of the dead are no longer ferried to the underworld, and instead linger on as shades who feast on the blood of the living. Raef is a child of the night. He lives in the shadows, on scraps, eking out a meager existence as a thief. But when an ornate box is sequestered in the Temple of Hyperion, the chance of a big score proves too great to resist. What he finds within propels him on an odyssey across the sea and back again.

Ten years after the collapse, Huxley has built a good life again. He has a loving wife, a farm with fields of golden barley, and a daughter with a strange and wonderful gift. Then the slavers come. Working out in the fields during the attack, Huxley returns too late. His daughter has been taken, and his wife is bleeding out, her last whispered words about a man with a scorpion tattoo on his neck. Where do the slavers go? Huxley has no idea. He knows only that they head east, and so will he, setting out on foot across the desert of the Wastelands.

Three lives come together in this truly epic fantasy where magic users go missing, old gods return, and creatures of light ravage the land. A high general with a dark voice in his head that begs to be released. A sheltered young woman addicted to magic. A reckless young man whose life changes after he dies. Together, they will change the world—whether they intend to or not.

This is the story about how I died. Not really.... I mean, I don't remember most of it, thank goodness. Long story short, I was betrayed. Some people I thought I could trust invaded my sky palace, stole my women, and enslaved my pet shadow hounds. I was destroyed, utterly. Or so they thought. Somehow, mana, the source of my previous power, brought me back. The backstabbing weasels think they are safe, barricaded in their strongholds. Here's the horrible part. They willingly sacrificed their own flesh and blood for security. And they had the nerve to call me evil?

Jia's people learned the hard way that there are no second chances. The Egril, their ancient enemy, struck with magic so devastating that Jia's armies were wiped out. Now terror reigns in the streets, and friend turns on friend just to live another day. Somehow Tinnstra - a deserter, a failure, nothing but a coward - survived. She wants no more than to hide from the chaos. But dragged into a desperate plot to retake Jia, surrounded by people willing to do anything to win the fight, this time Tinnstra will need to do more than hide.

On the edge of a far frontier rests a place of gentle manners and common civility - Last Chance. Threats of war change all of that. A hero is needed. A savior. Meet Aaron Turner, the small unassuming man who runs the Last Chance General Store. He may not be all that they hoped for.

Villains take center stage in this collection of 19 dark and magical stories. Listeners will be cheering for all the wrong heroes as some of the most fearsome, devious, and brutal antagonists perform savage deeds towards wicked ends. And why not? These characters are the champions of their own stories - evil is a matter of perspective. Contributors also include Mark Adler, Bradley P. Beaulieu, E.V. Morrigan, Peter Orullian, Matthew Ward, Kaaron Warren, Deborah A. Wolf, and Janny Wurts.

Everyone has heard of the Gameshouse. But few know all its secrets.... It is the place where fortunes can be made and lost through chess, backgammon - every game under the sun. But those whom fortune favors may be invited to compete in the higher league...a league where the games played are of politics and empires, of economics and kings. It is a league where Capture the Castle involves real castles, where hide and seek takes place on the scale of a continent.

Gyre hasn't seen his beloved sister since their parents sold her to the mysterious Twilight Order. Now, 12 years after her disappearance, Gyre's sole focus is revenge, and he's willing to risk anything and anyone to claim enough power to destroy the Order. Chasing rumors of a fabled city protecting a powerful artifact, Gyre comes face-to-face with his lost sister. But she isn't who she once was.

Once a student of alchemy with the dark scholars of the Technic League, Alaeron fled their arcane order when his conscience got the better of him, taking with him a few strange devices of unknown function. Now in hiding in a distant city, he's happy to use his skills creating minor potions and wonders - at least until the back-alley rescue of an adventurer named Jaya lands him in trouble with a powerful crime lord.

Two hundred years after the Forbidding was broken, Santhenar is locked in war with the lyrinx - intelligent, winged predators who will do anything to gain their own world. Despite the development of battle clankers and mastery of the crystals that power them, humanity is losing. Tiaan, a lonely crystal worker in a clanker manufactory, is experimenting with an entirely new kind of crystal when she begins to have extraordinary visions.

You define life or it defines you. In Shawn Speakman’s case, it was both. Lacking health insurance and diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2011, Shawn quickly accrued a massive medical debt that he did not have the ability to pay. That’s when New York Times best-selling author Terry Brooks offered to donate a short story that Shawn could sell to help alleviate those bills—and suggested he ask the same of his other writer friends. Unfettered is the result: An anthology built in order to relieve that debt, featuring short stories by some of the best fantasy writers in the genre.

Jia's people learned the hard way that there are no second chances. The Egril, their ancient enemy, struck with magic so devastating that Jia's armies were wiped out. Now terror reigns in the streets, and friend turns on friend just to live another day. Somehow Tinnstra - a deserter, a failure, nothing but a coward - survived. She wants no more than to hide from the chaos. But dragged into a desperate plot to retake Jia, surrounded by people willing to do anything to win the fight, this time Tinnstra will need to do more than hide.

Most of the time the Moontide Bridge lies deep below the sea, but every 12 years the tides sink and the bridge is revealed, its gates open for trade. The Magi are hell-bent on ruling this new world, and for the last two Moontides they have led armies across the bridge on "crusades of conquest". Now, the third Moontide is almost here, and this time the people of the East are ready for a fight... but it is three seemingly ordinary people that will decide the fate of the world.

Bounty hunter Ryhalt Galharrow has breathed Misery dust for 20 bitter years. When he's ordered to locate a masked noblewoman at a frontier outpost, he finds himself caught in the middle of an attack by the Deep Kings, one that signifies they may no longer fear the Engine. Only a formidable show of power from the very woman he is seeking, Lady Ezabeth Tanza, repels the assault.

When the leader of the ruthless Technic League calls in a favor, the mild-mannered alchemist Alaeron has no choice but to face a life he thought he'd left behind long ago. Accompanied by his only friend, a street-savvy thief named Skiver, Alaeron must head north into Numeria, a land where brilliant and evil arcanists rule over the local barbarian tribes with technology looted from a crashed spaceship.

Ten years after the collapse, Huxley has built a good life again. He has a loving wife, a farm with fields of golden barley, and a daughter with a strange and wonderful gift. Then the slavers come. Working out in the fields during the attack, Huxley returns too late. His daughter has been taken, and his wife is bleeding out, her last whispered words about a man with a scorpion tattoo on his neck. Where do the slavers go? Huxley has no idea. He knows only that they head east, and so will he, setting out on foot across the desert of the Wastelands.

Caitlin finally gets the chance to explore what's outside of the walls of the town she's been trapped in and finds vampires, werewolves, and zombie-like creatures.

Once there were three worlds, each with their own human species. Then, fleeing out of the void came a fourth species, the Charon. Desperate, on the edge of extinction, they changed the balance between the worlds forever. Karan, a sensitive with a troubled heritage, is forced to steal an ancient relic in repayment of a debt. It turns out to be the Mirror of Aachan, a twisted, deceitful thing that remembers everything it has ever seen.

When the world was young, twins were born. One brought light to a dark world; the other, darkness and danger. Their powers could not be denied, and they gathered others around them, men and women destined to use their gifts for good or evil. Today, their descendants walk the earth as the Chosen... and the ultimate battle is about to begin. Jacqueline Vargha has always run from her gift. Now Caleb D'Angelo forces his way into her life, demands his place as her lover, and insists she take her place as one of the Chosen. She flees, he pursues, but she can no longer deny her visions.

Nevada, 1869: Beyond the pitiless 40-Mile Desert lies Golgotha, a cattle town that hides more than its share of unnatural secrets. The sheriff bears the mark of the noose around his neck; some say he is a dead man whose time has not yet come. His half-human deputy is kin to coyotes. The mayor guards a hoard of mythical treasures. A banker's wife belongs to a secret order of assassins. And a shady saloon owner, whose fingers are in everyone's business, may know more about the town's true origins than he's letting on.

In the beginning, the gods destroyed the world. Five hundred years later, things haven’t gotten much better for humans. The demigods that were left behind to guard over humanity have been using them as fodder for an endless civil war between themselves, and the humans just go on dutifully slaughtering each other, battle after battle. It’s not all bad, though. Perry McGown makes his living off those bloody, stinking battlefields. He works on a crew that reclaims all the spent shell casings. But if anyone found out that he was a deserter from the war, he’d be executed for heresy.

It began as just another evening of fantasy gaming with James, Karl, Andrea, and the rest ready to assume their various roles as wizard, cleric, warrior, or thief. But sorcerous gamemaster Professor Deighton had something else planned for this unsuspecting group of college students. And the "game" soon became a matter of life and death as the seven adventurers found themselves transported to an alternate world and into the bodies of the actual characters they had been pretending to be....

Best-selling science fiction superstars Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle combine their talents with those of Steven Barnes in an extraordinary adventure of humankind’s first outpost in the farthest reaches of space. Light years from Earth, colonists land on a planet they name Avalon. It seems like a paradise—until native creatures savagely attack. It will take every bit of intelligence, courage, and military-style discipline to survive.