Firestorm

One wet February evening, three schoolfriends cut through the locked corridors of a university science block to gawk at a machine they were never meant to touch. Toby vanishes first. Drummond and Connor Breswell go in after him, and the pod swallows all three and throws them out somewhere no map of Earth has ever shown.

It is a world of ash and iron: a poisoned plain patrolled by a white wolf, a lion and a leopard; a shanty town of broken people crouched beneath the smoking walls of Dis; leather-armoured drones called Cerberites that hunt men for bounty and for sport. Beyond the districts of Exdis, ruled by bloated Barons who trade in servants and children, looms the black citadel of Dis itself, and buried under its tallest towers waits the Ice Palace, silent for a hundred years, expecting orders that have never come.

This world has a history, and it is ours. Six centuries ago a Traveller crossed time carrying a book called the Great Secret, meant to raise mankind to a higher plane. Instead the timeline split in two: one Earth went on unchanged; the other burned in the catastrophe men call Firestorm and curdled into a living hell of judgement courts, pitiless Barons and a Keeper whose true name is too evil to speak. A prophecy promises that one day a man from another world will come to avenge Firestorm. Or to finish what it started.

The Council of the resistance cannot decide whether Drummond and Connor are that prophecy or just two more bodies for the slave markets. Hardy and Namir, the scavengers who pulled them out of the forest, seem almost too kind to be true. Fulgar, a giant with a face melted by fire, swears he has waited all his life to meet them. And Minos, the judge with the scaly tail, takes a very close interest in what they might be worth.

To get Toby back and reach the pod that could carry them home, Drummond and Connor must cross the Mormo plain, slip past the Barons' districts, barter with the kind of hosts who serve fried grubs at table, and descend into the labyrinth beneath the city, where an immortal traitor has drawn breath since the year the Traveller landed. Because Drummond is starting to suspect the truth: he has felt this world before, the way you feel a half-remembered dream. Time here does not run straight, and something in him, something no machine ever built, may hold the power to unmake the Firestorm, or to set it burning all over again.

Every stranger offers help. Every offer has a price. In a world assembled from mankind's worst mistakes, two friends must decide whom to trust, what to believe, and how much of themselves they are willing to trade to bring one boy home.

Firestorm is a complete standalone adventure of time travel and damnation, Dante's Inferno reimagined as a post-apocalyptic fantasy of prophecy, monsters and machines.