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'Your blood-red skies are filled with smoke. Your bleach-white histories with lies. You walk sleeping. Wake senseless. Breathing deep of toxic blooms and forgetting all that has gone before. But I remember.
'I remember when two brothers waged bloody war over the right to sit in their father’s empty chair. I remember when orphaned twins faced each other across a field of crimson and steel, the fate of the Shima Shōgunate hanging in the poisoned sky between them.
'I remember when a blind boy stood before a court of storms and talons, armed only with a thin sword and a muttered prophecy and a desperate dream of saving the world.
'I remember when the skies above Shima were not red, but blue. Filled with thunder tigers. I remember when they left you. And I remember why. Let me tell you, monkey-child.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Notes
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A standalone ebook released as a prequel to the first volume in the Lotus War series.
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Steampunk Note: Though the novels in this series do not engage heavily with steampunk's primary cultural locus (nineteenth century English society), and the Japanese-inspired setting would often associate it with related but separate styles, such as silkpunk, we would nevertheless categorise it as steampunk. Attention should be given to the setting of a tyrannical society in which clockwork-based mechanical invention combines with pollution and disease to create a unique dystopia, remeniscent of steampunk conventions established with Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Awards
- 2013 winner Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction — Fantasy Division — Best Short Story
