Echoes of the Past

Mike Island woke in the streets of Tyken Town with no name he could remember and no past he could claim. For two years he built a quiet life of honest work and small friendships, telling himself the hole inside him would heal. Then a deranged beggar spoke his name, attacked him, and died at his feet, leaving Mike a vision of a burning world and a hooded figure that stared back from the flames.

Everything Mike believed about himself begins to unravel. He is an Oneron, born of a race of warriors, and the son of Hayden Island, a legendary soldier who vanished into the hidden armies gathering at the edge of the galaxy. He is also, by every account, a dead man, cut down on a scorched battlefield and saved only by his father's desperate spell, a forbidden working paid for with fourteen legendary crystals that restored Mike's body and took every memory with it.

Drawn out of hiding, Mike goes looking for the truth. At his side stand Williams Goodheart, a young prince sent by his gods to find him, bearing his father's sword and a golden sceptre that unsettles everyone who senses it; Ken Hawkings, the workmate who knows far more about soldiers and secrets than any builder should; and Perry Keenosh, the old keeper of his father's trust. Together they pull a thread that runs from a criminal warehouse in Tyken Town to an arms dealer's iron forge on the desert world of Carnan, and behind it all they find two names: Sacre, an empire of crime that buys whole armies, and Doon, the warlord who shattered Williams's homeland and now hunts the last survivor of a night Mike cannot remember.

Doon does not hunt alone. At his side moves Valdragannon, the Dark Sorcerer, who has coveted the power sleeping in Mike since the hour Mike died. And behind them waits something worse than soldiers: a lost Great War Ship, an army raised in secret from the missing thousands of the galaxy, and a purpose its crew will not name.

The closer Mike comes to answers, the less he likes them. A rifle answers to his hand as if it has known him for years. Fire magic scorches his palm and will not explain why. His strength runs strongest when his body should be failing. And in his dreams something patient and hungry keeps knocking at a door he cannot find, calling him in voices he almost trusts.

Hunted across the dunes by Sacre Guards, deceived by the only family he has left, and haunted by an echo that beats in his blood, Mike must decide who he was before the spell, and who he will become now. To live, he must master a power older than the stars, find the father the galaxy buried, and face the reason every road he walks leads back to the night he died.

Echoes of the Past is the second book of the Island Legends series: an operatic space fantasy of gods and soldiers, where memory is magic, and every promise of the past comes due.