From a brilliant new voice in fantasy comes a beautiful but deadly realm of triumph and doom, where an unforgettable heroine awakens an ancient, slumbering magic into a world cloaked in mystery ... and malignancy.

On a fateful night five hundred centuries ago, three mages sacrificed the goodness of the once-lovely land of Alasea, unleashing a prophecy of evil that has raged under the reviled rule of the Dreadlocks ever since. But now, on the anniversary of that ominous night, comes a stunning girl-child possessed by the long-lost Magic of the Red Fist.

Hounded and persecuted by the minions of darkness, Elena must flee from the Valley of the Moon into lands inhabited by silver-haired elv'in people and giant Highland og'res. Aided by a one-armed warrior and a strange seer, she forms a band of the hunted and the cursed, the outcasts and the outlaws, to battle the almighty forces of evil and rescue a glorious empire....