I’m really curious about Sordaneon, because it’s described as a heady mix between Dune (which I love the concept of) and Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series (of which I’ve recently read book 1 and love it). It sounds very up my alley! I was offered an ARC by Forest Path Books, only I’m soooo behind on ARCs I said it would be better for my conscience to do an excerpt post. Forest Path had an AMA with us on r/fantasy earlier this year, if you wanna check them out, part of our Small Press Friday series.

A fallen world littered with the corpses of broken god-machines, and a sheltered and angry youth destined to re-awaken their power. But to embody a god, Dorilian Sordaneon must first learn to be human…

To reawaken the Rill and save their world, its ruler Marc Frederick must find a way to win over Dorilian Sordaneon, last scion of a divine house that once controlled the Rill. Unfortunately, Dorilian hates him. And his family. And… everything.
Dorilian is blood bound to the Rill, a quasi-living artifact that spans continents and empowers a privileged few to reap the riches of an entire civilization. The problem is, decades after seizing control of the remaining god-machines, those privileged few aren’t willing to give up their power—even if that means imprisoning and destroying the human bloodline to which the Rill is tethered.
Taking her readers back to the roots of fantasy, L.L. Stephens has written a modern classic in  Sordaneon. With the sweeping world-building of Dune, political machinations reminiscent of the Wars of the Roses, and the tension of Too Like The Lightning, Sordaneon will be your next best read.
Published November 9, Sordaneon illuminates a fallen world, its broken god-machines, and the  bitter, burning hopes of those who would control them.

 

Excerpt content warning: View Spoiler »death, traumatic child birth « Hide Spoiler

Excerpt

Chapter One

 

The Rill grieved and Dorilian listened.

Other voices drew him along shadowed corridors and into the courtyard. Nights in Sordan were never dark. Rill glow from the city’s crown heights paled the sky and silvered rooftops, walls, and even the flowers in the trees. His shadow raced ahead as he darted up glow-bright steps far below the Rill’s luminescent arches and ran toward his mother’s room, the gilded chamber of an empress.

He found her not quite gone. Light from the courtyard showed her to be still in bed, unmoving upon waves of silk. Wetness shone in a black pool between her legs and ran in rivulets down the bedclothes. Dorilian stepped forward into the Rill light and toward the bed where sheer curtains billowed, reflected in an argent floor. Nothing in his seven years of life had prepared him to see his mother so silent.

 

A deep thrum, familiar and only noticed in passing, rolled above the city. More light spilled into the room. The Rill did not cease its operation. But the Rill must feel something, surely, if Dorilian could tell it was in pain. His tutors told him he was forbidden by unyielding law to speak to the Rill—so he did not tell them he could hear it. Not knowing what else to do, he reached for his mother’s mind the way he always had.

He found only a sickening swirl.

Too soon… too soon.

Her fading thoughts shaped themselves upon his lips—words so naked he flinched. He approached when she caught his eye.

 

Her ladies had fled. Why? Had they not heard the life within her signaling its distress? He’d run barefoot through the immense palace’s empty halls and pillared courts to her room and seen no one. Though she was Sordan’s Archessa, no guards stood outside her door, and no maids knelt in attendance. “Dor,” She whispered the pet name few others would dare. He smelled licorice on her breath, seductive and sweet. “Tell your grandfather… it was merethe.” Her fingers, white as fangs, caught his hand and clung to it. “My poor son. My baby? Does he live?”

“He lives, Mother.” He felt that life, too.

“Tell me… truly. You are god-born. Give me truth—”

“My brother lives, Mother.” Her fear frightened him. Darkness ate at her core of light. “See? I will show you—”

The bedcovers between her legs gleamed wet and dark. He reached into the darkness and lifted the newborn, its tiny body and twig-like limbs barely visible within the dense membrane that shrouded it. A cord thick as his small finger held it to a clump of something black and heavy, so he lifted that, too. He cradled the warm mass in his fingers, slick with blood. His brother. Surely the one she had promised him just a week ago in the sweet-scented gardens of Rhondda.

Is that my brother? He had placed his hand on her rounded belly. Are you making him?

She had laughed. She had laughed. Yes, tyrant. But give me time to finish him. He shall come when he is ready. He will be very small and will need his big brother to protect him.

His brother, then… small, just as she’d said. So small, a lump of blood and ichor, with jelly and not bone for limbs, that didn’t cry or breathe or move. Only the baby’s heart moved, tapping against his finger. He had never seen a baby so tiny, not even filling his small, boyish hands. Hopeful, he showed his brother to her. But instead of being put at peace, her throat opened with an animal’s howling.

He recoiled, driven back by her black wells of pain, her woman’s loss he could not understand. Retreating, he tucked himself into a dark small corner beside the wide door onto the terrace, cradling his tiny brother against him until the world fell silent.

“Mother?” he whispered. “Mother? Mother….”

His query echoed back to him, as thin and cold as the light that bathed her. Valyane. That was her name, the one his lips had never called her. Valyane, the Archessa Sordaneon—so beautiful, men said, that the moon prostrated itself nightly before her balcony. Even in death and pallor she was beautiful, honey-dark hair strung like webs upon the pillows, gray eyes moon pale and unseeing. 

He held his free hand into the Rill light, toward her. Between bloodstains, his hand shone as white as hers had, ghostly, drained of living brightness. He searched for life, but hers had fled. She was cold, and he was cold, and death had not yet left the room. The Rill’s pain lingered. He bent his head over the frail, curled mannequin he clutched to his breast and breathed upon it, his lips touching the wet, velvet membrane. Its borders, delicate as new fern, filmed his lips with blood, and he felt it draw upon the moisture in his breath… his warmth, his life.

Brother. Brother, please don’t go. Don’t leave me.

The babe twitched fragile limbs and Dorilian froze. All at once he felt large and clumsy. What if he moved and somehow harmed his brother? Light yet pulsed in the tiny body, but he knew so little about babies. His tutors had not prepared him for such things as this. He knew only that the baby’s mind was quiet. Not silent—not as his mother’s now was, unfindable—merely quiet. The baby did not think yet. He could tell, though, that his brother knew him. Dorilian had felt him many times under their mother’s skin. Opening his shirt, he cupped the newborn to the naked skin of his chest, the better to warm him.

You’re with me… stay with me. I will protect you now. He wrapped his brother in thought, for the babe had no thoughts at all and his nourished it like milk. He sensed its un-thoughts, too. His brother sought their mother again. Oneness, warmth, and life.

He could offer all three. They had shared her in a communion unremembered. Dorilian’s tutors had told him Highborn kind were one blood, one life. A manifold godhead. Now he felt the truth of their teaching. His bond to his brother called to him as the babe’s unfinished body cleaved to his flesh. Red membranes pulsed to his warmth, a flutter of wetness and a prickle of tiny things boring into his skin. Though he could not see them, he felt the tendrils work deeper, like worms burrowing in earth. 

He gasped as his chest burned and then his heart did too, but still he did not pull the baby away. He forced his fingers to relax about the tiny form. He didn’t think he would hurt him beyond this pain he felt. His brother would never hurt him. Blood pounded in his ears as his heart beat ever more rapidly. So fast! Through a haze of fear, he yielded to its imperative… what his brother sought, he let him find, afraid of what might happen if he did not. 

Unmoving but for rapid breaths, braced against the wall, he watched the baby change. The urgency of it dizzied him. Beneath that translucent skin new organs blossomed upon stalks of rose, existing buds swelled… the strange eyes, black and round, shrouded in membrane, eyelids fused… a breastbone like glass, the tiny heart beating beneath it like a ruby as filaments of rose became threads. His lungs drew air and the baby’s wet lungs unfolded, tiny ribs sucking in and out like strings with each shuddering breath. There were even bones now, fragile as a baby bird’s. That thought frightened him anew—the baby bird his mother had shown him, fallen early from its nest, had died.

Merethe. He worked the word into his mind, finding it strange and lovely, but deadly too. She had told him what had killed her. His family had enemies. Somehow, they had torn his brother from her body along with her life.

If they would kill his mother and her baby, might they mean to kill him next?

He turned his head, an edge of curtain caressing his cheek as he detected voices in the courtyard below. Men’s voices, but his father’s not among them.

Under his hand the babe stirred, much larger and stronger but tiny still. Its delicate, red-laced eyelids appeared closed as before, but the fingernails had grown in. It looked more like a baby now. Dorilian was the one who had shrunken and changed. Bending a leg, he noticed how his bone stood out clearly beneath the skin, like a dog’s. He thought he would not have the strength to move, but he did, using the wall for support. Holding the baby carefully to his chest, he wondered who would come—and if he would have to flee.

Keeping to the curtains and shadows, he watched as the door from the corridor swung open. Two of his mother’s handmaidens, the two who should have been with her this night, entered the room. Their dark garments and snoods blended with the shadows, but Rill light painted their faces bright as moonstones. A man followed them, his murky vestments emblazoned with golden crown shapes and the rearing outline of a horse. Dorilian recognized the emblem of Essera’s king, a man who dared think himself Sordan’s overlord. A King’s Man, then.

The women, more silent than he’d ever seen them, hung back to let the man approach the bed. The King’s man looked down upon the body of the Archessa, then put out his hand, running it down one of her naked thighs, her cold white flesh. Dorilian stiffened. No man touched his mother! Not even his father ever did so. Couldn’t this man tell death had already claimed her? With one hand the man raised her nightdress, studied the blood between her legs… then thrust his hand into it, combing clots and searching the folds of bed linen. With a muttered curse, he lifted pale fingers black with gore and wiped them on her white thigh.

 

Choking back a cry, Dorilian bolted from the shadows. He pushed wisps of curtain aside and fled through the open door into the night. Outside, the terrace shone ghostly white as the Serat raised vast, pale walls around him like sentinels. Above him, immense wings of ethereal Rill structure cradled the sky, bright glow spilling across the heights.

Over the wall was death. To each side of the terrace plunged stairs which would take him to the lower levels. Dorilian knew a hundred places to hide, and there would be people loyal to his family down there. Someone would hear him shout. They would have to come. As he ran, footsteps ran after him. Heavy. Thudding. The babe clutched within his bloodied nightshirt let out its first cry, a thin sound lost in the open place through which he fled. His brother felt his fear. He was halfway down the wide stair leading to the Well of Birds before he saw the soldiers advancing upon the landing, a giant at their head, and the gleaming of drawn swords filled his eyes.

The man running after him stopped when Dorilian reached the bottom. Dorilian hunched over as soldiers charged past him up the stair. Their tall commander froze, wide-eyed at seeing him. Dorilian ran headlong toward Tiflan’s outstretched arm but then pulled back, mindful of the baby. His giant cousin’s gaze drifted to his blood-smeared shirt. Soldiers had surrounded his pursuer and now dragged their captive down the stair.

“Is that why you were chasing one of the god-born, King’s Man? Is that why he’s covered with blood?”

“It’s not his!” Gold bright hair disordered and vestments in disarray, the villain ceased to struggle. “Look at him! See for yourself. He’s not harmed in any way.”

Unconvinced, Tiflan knelt before Dorilian. “Are you hurt, son?”

Dorilian shook his head. He trusted Tiflan, whose mother was sister to his own. “No.”

“What’s this?” Tiflan asked softly. He moved an immense hand toward him but stopped short of touching. Dorilian pulled aside his fingers to reveal the infant’s tiny head pressed to his sticky, red-stained chest.

“My brother.” He barely had the breath to gasp out the words. The very world was spinning. Tiflan’s concerned face floated before his eyes, losing focus. “My mother… she’s dead.”

“Your… brother?” For some reason, Tiflan paled. He turned to the tall man at his side. “Take five men and go to the Archessa’s room!” To another, he said, “Get Bas Sebbord! Get him now!”

Dorilian swayed as Tiflan wrapped a strong arm around his shoulder and swept him up into both arms. Dorilian held his brother close. Overhead, the sky turned and opened, light streaming like strands of starlight lifted by wind, thousands of unfurling filaments… he blinked and the sky turned normal again, clotted with stars and slashed by Rill glow from the god-structure arranged overhead. The King’s Man could not get him now. He was safe with Tiflan, guarded by the Rill.

Voices vied with the darkness. Dorilian heard them but human speech washed over his drifting thoughts like waves over rocks. Sometimes he understood the words and tried to listen, but the weight of his safety proved more soothing and tiredness dragged him under. Even when he opened his eyes he saw only chaos and soldiers. The King’s Man was gone.

 

His grandfather arrived, his face so terrible in grief and anger that Dorilian closed his eyes rather than look upon it. Weariness pulled him toward sleep but he fought to stay above it, wanting to tend the baby’s new thoughts. He and his brother shared a silent place, their bodies touching, and their minds nestled like clasped hands.

“The bastards broke their word.” Sebbord’s condemnation was cold as stone. He placed his hand on Dorilian’s head. “This is my reward for all my promises. My Valyane is dead and her sons at the mercy of wolves. This is Essera’s gift to me.”

“Their father—” Tiflan’s voice rumbled through the wall of his chest, vibrating under Dorilian’s ear along with the rub of leather armor, the sounds of rapid footsteps and sharp words exchanged in corridors. His cousin’s long walking strides rocked him gently as their grandfather continued to speak.

“I’ll give Deben no second chances. He failed to protect her. True, theirs was no love match—but she was his wife! And see what they did to my beautiful girl—” Sebbord’s words turned ragged. “I care not who is behind this. Marc Frederick or his minions, it matters not. They conspire alike. It was their plan to get Deben to surrender control of his heir, and now those jackals will tear at him until he yields. ‘For the boy’s protection,’ they will say. ‘As surety for Sordan’s peace and the withdrawal of our administrators,’ they will plead. And Deben will listen, now that Valyane no longer stands like a lioness between them and her son. They know I have no legal standing in this matter.”

Dorilian relaxed as the old man’s fingers gently stroked his hair. He understood that they spoke about him, only not in the way adults usually did. If this was any indication, people said more important things—terrible things—when they thought he was asleep. In his mind he repeated the name his grandfather had used, a name he had heard before. Marc Frederick. The barbarian, Essera’s king. His enemy.

“So we leave, and we take him with us,” Tiflan agreed. “But is Dor strong enough to travel? See how weak he is… the babe sapped his strength. We dare not guess how.”

They came into another open place. Exposed, brushed by wind. Briefly, Dorilian’s eyes flickered open to a view of the Serat towering above him, all white planes and angles, like an immense ship caught upon the cliffs. They were now on the lower levels, then.

 

“The child thwarts all their plans. Deben has been denying Valyane’s babe for weeks. He paved that path. Because of him, those vultures saw the way clear to kill her and also rid him of the child.” Sebbord’s words would have iced sword steel.

Dorilian turned just his head, his hair snagging on Tiflan’s emblems of rank. Tears silvered his grandfather’s eyes and stained that aged cheek, trailing down Sebbord’s drawn face in glistening threads. Other sounds intruded now, the jangle and creak of harness and the clop of horses’ hooves, sharp on stone. Sebbord held out his arms. “Here, give my grandsons to me.”

Dorilian did not resist as the old man’s arms looped under Tiflan’s and lifted him. Other horses departed ahead of them. He saw the King’s Man bound to one, still dressed in his court finery but for a hood covering his head and shoulders. Another horse bore a long bundle wrapped in black cloth. As he watched, it too left with more guards.

“They gave her merethe.” This time Dorilian didn’t look away from the pain that touched the old man’s eyes. “She told me to tell you.”

Sebbord shifted him in his arms. “Thank Leur she had someone to tell. It should not have been you.”

“Where are we going?” Uncomfortable, he stirred against his grandfather’s grip on him but took care not to jostle the infant he still held in the stiffening fabric of his nightshirt. No one had sought to relieve him of his burden, as though they were afraid to take the child from him. Though his eyes wanted to close, he held them open as Sebbord looked down upon him gravely. 

“To Teremar, lad.” Teremar was Sebbord’s domain, separated from Sordan’s island by the deep waters of Lake Sarkuan. Dorilian had heard his mother talk of it as a land of grass plains and rich farms. “Young as you are, I think you understand your city has fallen under the sway of men we cannot trust.”

“But I am Sordaneon. I must stay in the city with the Rill and my people.”

“It’s the Rill they want, son, through you. And the Rill I will not give them.”

Dorilian saw only determination in the old man’s lined face, the way Sebbord’s golden gaze shone piercingly beneath stern silver brows. Sebbord would not tell him lies. His enemies wanted the Rill Entity. His mother had told him the same thing, as had his father. He was Rill kind—god-descended, gifted, different from the servants around him though he looked like them in body. Human. Mostly human. But Highborn too—and he didn’t want to do anything that might place his legacy at risk. And now there was his brother to consider.

Sebbord had been a Rill mage, an Epopte sworn to the Entity’s service. Dorilian had no doubt the old man would protect them. He weighed this against the protection of his father, who was cold to him and wanted to send him to live in Essera among men like the King’s Man, who he had last seen wearing his mother’s blood like a red glove on his hand. And hadn’t Sebbord just said his father meant to deny his tiny brother?

“I will go with you,” he said. Because he was Highborn and part of the Mind, any act he undertook required his consent.

They left the palace by way of the east garden and the quadrant controlled by Tiflan’s men. Dorilian barely remembered departing Sordan, only that they followed a barracks road to the edge of the city. One of his grandfather’s men found a wet nurse among the wharf folk’s wives and daughters, a plump girl into whose wide brown eyes Dorilian peered for a long minute before he handed over his brother. The girl now cradled the babe to her breast. Dorilian rode with Sebbord. As they set off down a road that would take them to a secure estate and a ship that would carry them to Teremar, they looked back only once.

 

To a man the party reined in their horses as a dulcet whine vibrated the graying skies of morning. Silent, they watched a silver bolt born in the heart of the high places they had left behind split the dawn and break above the sleeping city. A massive spear of light tore open the darkness, heading north. Dorilian barely registered the charys before the gleaming spindle vanished. The god propelled the vessel far away, to lands that for Dorilian were but names. He envisioned the things it surely carried: passengers bound for distant cities, spices, horses, cascades of golden wheat, all flowing into the coffers of mighty Essera.

“They have not discovered us yet,” Sebbord said. “The Rill runs as ordained. They would have held it if they knew us missing.”

Dorilian burrowed deeper into his grandfather’s arms. He had wanted his own horse, but he was glad of the old man’s warmth and the strength that held him fast. “I shall ride the Rill one day.” He resented that he never had. 

“Yes, son, you shall. Ride it and more.” Sebbord stared into the distance where the Rill had gone. Loss stained his face with yet another kind of grieving. “And may you wrest it back from the jackals that feast upon its holy carcass.

About the author

L.L. Stephens writes books with complex characters who inhabit large, fully imagined worlds and encounter exotic dangers. Borrowing from a nomadic childhood, writing about an outsider looking for ways to survive in new and strange societies comes naturally. When not writing, L.L. enjoys cruises on the high seas, playing deeply immersive board games, and family time. Right now, L.L. is living in and trying to figure out the western suburbs of Philadelphia, and assessing whether the neighbors really do sound like characters from Mare of Easttown.

 

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