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Strangers from the South: Short Story Collection
Before Ashwyn found a boy in the ruins of a massacred village, he wandered. An Albah ranger from a dying people, Ashwyn has spent centuries trying to reach the rising sun, only to be pulled west again and again by unfinished history. In A House Made of Clay, a missed sailing season strands the pair in an ancient river city, where a series of ritual murders leads them from temple gardens and royal halls to something that should have remained buried with the dead. In Children of the Wastes, passage west comes at the price of guarding a caravan through an expanding desert. There they encounter a forgotten branch of Ashwyn’s own people, an ancient rite he does not understand, and a vision of a world that will one day continue without him. And in Ever Circling, what begins as a voyage across the Green Sea becomes a struggle against something far more indifferent than monsters. Shipwrecked and alone, Ashwyn must decide whether there is any reason to keep walking at all. Three linked stories cross ruined civilizations, dying landscapes, forgotten gods, ritual violence, and the deep history beneath myth—ending where Strangers from the South begins.