The Gossamer Mage

by Czerneda, Julie E.

• ISBN13: 9780756412340
• ISBN10: 075641234X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2020-09-29
• Publisher: Daw Books

Summary

Winner of the 2020 Aurora Award for Best Novel, this fantasy epic tells the tale of one mage who must stand against a Deathless Goddess who controls all magic.

Only in Tananen do people worship a single deity: the Deathless Goddess. Only in this small, forbidden realm are there those haunted by words of no language known to woman or man. The words are Her Gift, and they summon magic.

Mage scribes learn to write Her words as intentions: spells to make beasts or plants, designed to any purpose. If an intention is flawed, what the mage creates is a gossamer: a magical creature as wild and free as it is costly for the mage.

For Her Gift comes at a steep price. Each successful intention ages a mage until they dare no more. But her magic demands to be used; the Deathless Goddess will take her fee, and mages will die.

To end this terrible toll, the greatest mage in Tananen vows to find and destroy Her. He has yet to learn She is all that protects Tananen from what waits outside. And all that keeps magic alive.

Author Biography

Julie E. Czerneda is a biologist and best-selling writer whose science fiction has received international acclaim. She is the author of the popular Species Imperative trilogy, the Web Shifters series, and the Clan Chronicles novels. She was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her stand-alone novel, In the Company of Others, won Canada's Prix Aurora Award and was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished SF. Her Night’s Edge series, A Turn of Light and A Play of Shadow, won the Aurora Award for Best English Novel in two consecutive years. Julie has edited/co-edited sixteen SFF anthologies, including the Aurora-winning Space Inc. and Under Cover of Darkness. Julie lives with her husband and two children in the lake country of central Ontario, under skies so clear they could take seeing the Milky Way for granted, but never do.