Read an excerpt below to get a taste of what Ninth City Burning has in store for readers:
The Valentine War, Earth 500 Years AgoIt starts with the world how it used to be, with countries and billions of people living everywhere. Back then there was no such thing as thelemity, and people built houses and machines sort of like they have in settlements today, but all of that changed when the Valentines came.
The reason we call them the Valentines is that the day they first attacked, February 14 on the old Western Calendar, was called "Valentine’s Day". We still don’t know what the Valentines call themselves, because we’ve never been able to talk to them. We don’t even know what they look like. People had all sorts of different names for them early in the war, but "Valentine" is the one that ended up being the most popular. It used to mean something totally different, but not many people remember that now.
We never saw them coming. All at once cities just started disappearing. A city would be there, everything totally normal, and then it would be gone, nothing but rubble and a cloud of dust. By the time we figured out we were under attack, half the cities in the world had already been destroyed. We tried to fight back, but the Valentines had thelemity, and our strongest weapons were next to useless. They probably would have killed every single person on the planet, except for one thing: It turned out we could use thelemity too.