A wayward city spinning through time and place connects and draws travelers; trapping them with no way to return home. Each traveler: Nico the peddler; Stina the university graduate; Jo o, a Lieutenant for the King of Portugal; and Croydon, a boy at the edge of adolescence-each must choose to either stay in the strange medieval city where magic infects and wealth is not measured in coin, or leave to find a new home in the next time and place.


Many arrivals accept the city's magic, others desire all the power for themselves, and one seeks to destroy it. Disrupting the magic of the oasis could trigger the unmaking of the city and the world containing it.


Nothing but silence, heat, and wind. The road was empty except for Jo o and King Sebasti o. It could only be purgatory. "Perhaps..." Jo o said, more to himself than the king. "Perhaps we really have died, and this is the realm of sleeping kings."


A rich, magical debut: a tale of finding ourselves in unfamiliar places and situations, and the choices we face. Do we find solace in what familiarity remains, risk everything hoping to regain what we lost, or embrace the strange and the unknown?