Description

Eleven thousand years ago, the Naga sages of Patala forged seven divine stones to bind the great serpent goddess Anantha to the world of men. The stones, scattered to seven holy cities of the Indian subcontinent, have kept the cosmic balance ever since.

There were not seven stones. There were eight.

Twenty-three-year-old Meghna Banhatti has spent her entire life in the temple city of Srinagara, training as a junior cartographer for the Imperial Library. She is competent, polite, and entirely unremarkable — until the morning a dying foreign monk presses a small black stone into her palm and tells her, in a language she does not speak but somehow understands, to run.

What follows is a sweeping, beautifully imagined fantasy debut that blends Naga mythology, Vedic cosmology, and the spice-route geography of an alternate medieval India. As Meghna flees east — pursued by an order of crimson-robed assassins who have been hunting the Eighth Stone for two thousand years — she must learn what her bloodline truly is, why her mother died the night she was born, and whether the cosmic balance the priests have lied to protect was a balance worth preserving in the first place.