There is a land called Eustad. At its heart lies Syvarius, seat of the Kingdom of Mariza. To the west sits Burntwood, half of it ash — a reminder from Abbadon that the clock is real. To the east, Havaran churns with industry.

  Beneath all of that, there are villages. Small, forgettable places where people exist because they have to exist somewhere. In the south, Smardoh is one of them. A cattle farming village where the cattle eat, the waste is handled, and life moves in circles that have been turning the same way for generations.

  Iruga Sagun handles the waste. He is in his mid-twenties, the onlyborn of Kamiki Sagun, village leader, and every smell that has ever reached him has been dung. He wakes to it, works in it, and returns home carrying it, and he is sick of it in the deep, quiet way that has no outburst because there is no one to outburst at.

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  This is the world he wakes up in, and it is a world running out of time. Long ago, Abbadon extended the Offer of Mercy — ten centuries for humanity, and at the end of it, the crusade. Nine are gone and this is the tenth.

  In this last century, a rumor has begun to move through the land. A prophecy, passed in whispers and dismissed in daylight — a pure woman as a messenger, and a power called The Divinity.

  What becomes of humanity in Eustad? What becomes of it at all?