Pokemon meets fantasy.
Saif finally bonded a monster of his own. The bond is going to kill him.
A monster-taming fantasy in an Arabian-inspired desert.
In Sahari, everything runs on Faunines. They're beasts made of sand and light and living illusion, and you bond one for life, if you ever get the chance. Saif never had one. His own tribe sold him when he was nine, and slaves don't stand Trials.
He gets one anyway, at sixteen, because of an egg that was never supposed to be his. The thing that hatches for him is a Sarab, a cat made of illusion. The last one woke centuries ago.
So now Saif has a Faunine, and a problem. The bond is slowly breaking his mind. He has seven years, maybe less. The one cure is on the far side of the Mist, where the maps stop, in the ruins of the empire that fell when the stars came down.
He also has Zahatar. An old Draconic Dwarf smith who lost his own son a long time ago, and who still stopped on the road one day for a limping slave boy with strange feathery hair no one could explain, and let him ride for a while.
Of Sand and Stars is book 1 of the Eternity series. A curse with a deadline, and at the middle of it all, an old smith and a boy who end up father and son in every way that counts.
