Ari Marmell – författare

Welcome to the Goblin Corps. May the best man lose.

Morthûl, the dreaded Charnel King, has failed. Centuries of plotting from the heart of the Iron Keep, deep within the dark lands of Kirol Syrreth—all for naught. Foiled at the last by the bumbling efforts of a laughable band of so-called heroes. Still, after uncounted centuries of survival, the Dark Lord isn’t about to go down without a fight, particularly in battle against a mortal! No, the Charnel King still has a few tricks up his putrid and tattered sleeves, and the only thing that can defeat him now may just be the inhuman soldiers on whom he’s pinned his last hopes.

They called him the Terror of the East. His past shrouded in mystery, his identity hidden behind a suit of enchanted black armour and a skull-like helm, Corvis Rebaine carved a bloody path through Imphallion, aided by Davro, a savage ogre, and Seilloah, a witch with a taste for human flesh. No shield or weapon could stop his demon-forged axe. And no magic could match the spells of his demon slave, Khanda.Yet just when ultimate victory was in his grasp, Rebaine faltered. His plans of conquest, born from a desire to see Imphallion governed with firmness and honesty, shattered. Amid the chaos of a collapsing army, Rebaine vanished, taking only a single hostage - the young noblewoman Tyannon - to guarantee his escape.Seventeen years later, Rebaine and Tyannon are married, living in obscurity and raising their children, a daughter and a son. Rebaine has put his past behind him, given up his dreams of conquest. Not even news of Audriss - an upstart warlord following Rebaine''s old path of conquest - can stir the retired warrior to action.Until his daughter is assaulted by Audriss'' goons.Now, to rescue the country he once tried to conquer, Rebain once more dons the armour of the Terror of the East and seeks out his former allies. But Davro has become a peaceful farmer. Seilloah has no wish to leave her haunted forest home. And Khanda ... well, to describe his feelings for his former master as undying hatred would be an understatement.But even if Rebaine can convince his onetime comrades to join him, he faces a greater challenge: does he dare to reawaken the part of him that glories in cruelty, blood and destruction? With the safety of his family at stake, can he dare not to?

Welcome to the Goblin Corps. May the best man lose.

Morthûl, the dreaded Charnel King, has failed. Centuries of plotting from the heart of the Iron Keep, deep within the dark lands of Kirol Syrreth—all for naught. Foiled at the last by the bumbling efforts of a laughable band of so-called heroes. Still, after uncounted centuries of survival, the Dark Lord isn’t about to go down without a fight, particularly in battle against a mortal! No, the Charnel King still has a few tricks up his putrid and tattered sleeves, and the only thing that can defeat him now may just be the inhuman soldiers on whom he’s pinned his last hopes.

For Flight Engineer Cynthia Han and her fellow astronauts aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 81 has proved as mundane as space travel ever gets.

Yes, this would be Cynthia’s final NASA mission, for reasons she has so far kept from the rest of the crew; and yes, the latest billionaire “space tourist” has managed to irritate everyone on board. Still, none of them could have asked for a smoother experience.

Until the morning they wake up to silence. All communication with Earth, gone. From half a dozen different agencies with multiple installations and redundancies across the globe, there is simply… nothing.

And through the viewports of the ISS, only the thick veil of churning, lightning-veined dust to suggest the Earth remains at all.

Now, without ground control, without the proper telemetries or calculations or even reliable visuals, Cynthia and the rest of Expedition 81 must make their way home. For most, it will be the most fraught and the most frightening task of their lives.

But it will be nothing compared to the world that now awaits them beyond the dust.

The world has ended.

Along with other scattered survivors, astronaut Cynthia Han and the remainder of ISS Expedition 81 have finally learned what happened to the people they’d left behind, and it’s worse than any of them could have imagined.

But even if life as Cynthia knew it is over, her struggles most certainly are not. Joshua Lamb, granted strange and inhuman abilities even as civilization died around him, directs his zealots to scoop up every pocket of survivors, to offer them the simplest choice: Join or die. The nightmarish Crooked Men still hunt the darkened, hollowed cityscapes. And towering over it all, the mind-breaking obelisks with their unreadable alien message.

At stake are not just the lives of Cynthia and her companions, but the last flickering embers of the human race. To succeed, she must not only learn the true purpose of the obelisks; she must come to understand that the worst of humanity’s instincts and sins were never limited to us alone.