The First Architect of Eterra: The Iron of the Anvil: Deluxe Edition - The Eterra Cycle Prequels, #5

On the world called the Anvil, morning is only a lesser darkness.

Beneath a red sun, the settlement of Vharadon clings to black mountains and iron plains. Its people survive by the strength of their hands, the endurance of old machines, and the hope that one more shift, one more repaired seal, one more ration of water will carry them through the storm.

Tor Voss has spent his life in the cab of a mining frame called Saint's Burden. He knows the roads beneath the dust. He knows the sound of stone before it breaks. He knows that the Anvil takes good people without warning.

Then a mine collapse opens something beneath the world.

Workers vanish. Crawlers are dragged into the deep. Strange red shapes begin moving through the tunnels, the shafts, and the forgotten places under Vharadon. As fear spreads, the city's leaders demand harder laws, sealed gates, and sacrifices made in the name of survival.

But Tor has inherited another lesson.

His father, Jorren Voss, crossed the void from a dying Earth carrying little more than grief, a prayer book, and the belief that no hungry world has the right to decide what a person is worth. Now Tor must choose whether that belief can survive when every open gate may cost lives, every act of mercy may weaken the city, and the darkness beneath the mountain begins to answer.

For the Anvil is not empty.

It was never empty.

And the things below remember every wound cut into the stone.

The Iron of the Anvil is a dark, mythic science-fiction epic of iron storms, buried horrors, colossal mining frames, ancient secrets, fathers and sons, and a people fighting not only to survive, but to remain human beneath the weight of a merciless world.