Thursday, August 21, 2014

Ignifer’s Rise by Michael John Grist Giveaway & Excerpt


Ignifer’s Rise
by Michael John Grist

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BLURB:

The fate of the world is written in scars.  In a bleak industrial city where marks in skin are a sentence to death, Sen is a child condemned. Cursed with mysterious scars carved by his own mother's hand, he leads a fearful hidden life in the city's last abbey. 

Then the King's brutal Adjunc attack, and Sen barely escapes with his life. Lost and alone in the city's dark hinterlands, he begins an exhilarating race to find the truth behind his scars. In stinking black sewers and the lava-buried ruins of an ancient civilization, he uncovers a truth far stranger than he ever imagined, laid out by his long-dead mother: an apocalypse god is rising, and only the legendary hero Saint Ignifer can stop it. 

But Saint Ignifer is dead. 

Revolution rocks the city. The blood of all castes runs in the streets. With a storm of new faith raging out from the barricades, Sen must embrace the terrible fate his mother wrote in his scars- in the volcano's caldera, at the end of the world- before the black jaws of the apocalypse descend.  For the Rot is coming, and the Saint must rise.

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Excerpt 

Avia fled through the ash-smothered streets of Aradabar, and the Rot's fiery black tongue swept close behind.

Moths and Butterflies thudded to ground around her, bursting on cobbled stone, their broad wings seared away by the Rot's ashen touch. Avia ran on, down burnlit streets through rushes of mounding dust, as agonized screams rang out from behind.

They were all going to die.

Through breaks in the city's skyline of library towers she glimpsed the column of flame rising from the horizon, like a brilliant orange flower painted on the sky. The mountain was erupting; one last defense against the Rot, and soon Aradabar would be gone.

She sped down the narrow alleys of the outer bookyards, striding over bodies already half-buried in volcanic dust, holding her newborn son close. The wounds in his face were scabbing now, lines she had carved with her own hand that would save or damn them all.

"Help us, please!" voices called from a burning hut.

She glimpsed children trapped inside, hay-stuffed pillows tamped over their heads against falling rock. She couldn't help them, and ran on.

At a canal she came upon a thronging exodus of carriages and barges, filled with frantic denizens shouting to one another through the scalding ash. She slipped between their carriage wheels and ran across their jumbled barge decks.

"Lady Avia!" a Man of Quartz called out, but she only pulled her hood tight about her head and continued, leaving them behind.

"Where is King Seem?" he called after her. "Where is our King?"

Moments later, his cries joined the eruption's cacophony as the Rot found him.



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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Michael John Grist is a 34-year old British writer and ruins photographer who lives in Tokyo, Japan. He writes dark and surreal science fiction and fantasy, inspired by authors such as David Gemmell and Orson Scott Card.

In his free time he explores and photographs abandoned places around the world, such as ruined theme parks, military bases, underground bunkers, and ghost towns. These explores have drawn millions of visitors to his website:  michaeljohngrist.com, and often provide inspiration for his fiction.

You can buy Saint Ignifer's Rise here on





And, friend him on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/mjgwrites


 Michael will be awarding an autographed print copy of Ignifer's Rise to a randomly drawn winner.

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