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Dedication

The Witch Roads duology is the book that reignited my love of writing during a rough period when I wondered if I should just quit.

I therefore dedicate it to all who persevere even as it may seem easier to give up.

Never give up.

I hope that you, that we, that all of us, find the will and heart to keep going.

1 ON ORDINARY LANES AND BEHIND UNPROTECTED WALLS

ONE HUNDRED AND thirty years after the Pall tore deadly rifts through the Tranquil Empire, it is still prudent to avoid walking abroad at night. Even people holding official tokens that permit them to travel on the safety of the imperial roads will halt before the sun sets. These tokens allow them to lodge at an imperial hostel protected by a split in the road. But many people—most people—have no choice but to walk about their lives on ordinary lanes and sleep behind unprotected walls.

The Shield of Peace and Prosperity so forcefully promised by the empire’s founders has, it turns out, only ever sheltered some, not all. This is exactly what the holy venerables of the Heart Temple predicted at the dawn of the empire, to no avail.

Three hundred years ago, these temple theurgists and custodians wrote uncompromising tracts condemning imperial ambition. They spoke out in village plazas and city markets. They warned against the consolidation of power into the hands of a single military clan.

In answer, the newly appointed imperial censors burned their pamphlets as treasonous. The imperial sentinels accused the venerables of sorcery and burned them as witches. The imperial engineers sealed their bones into the great roads that link together the growing empire and facilitate the swift movement of its armies.

After the rising of the Spore-laden Pall in the reign of the ill-fated Azalea Emperor, it was soon discovered that the imperial roads repelled the Pall and its deadly Spore. The imperial archivists sent out official dispatches proclaiming that it was the harmonious and honorable magic wielded by the reconstituted imperial theurgists, in cooperation with the imperial wardens, that protected the roads against the Pall’s malign influence.