Publisher's Synopsis
There was a king, once a sorcerer. Now an outcast trapped for more years than he can say, trudging the wastelands of a thousand apocalyptic worlds, scrounging from wreckage to build a means of escape. Perhaps even a way back to where he came from, many hundreds of millions of years ago. Thistrel's Depth is a galaxy long settled, a place where artificial minds known as the Throlken have claimed the cores of stars for themselves. Their appointed stewards, the Sovereigns, command hundreds of billions of worlds, in a time of apparent peace and plenty. The Sovereigns possess the means to visit parallel realities, known as Phaslairs: clones of the universe, with more birthed every second. They have learned to burst the skin of one Phaslair and drop into the next, into a reality quite changed, appearing inside the body of someone, or something else. And, running through each reality like a crack, is the fabled Well: a fissure in the Phaslairs into which horrors were flung. Never to return. Until now. The secret is out. There exists a unique and priceless map of the realities, created by a hapless explorer; a map so valuable that a kaleidoscope of alien forms - amongst them a Sovereign agent - will cross every Phaslair to get their hands on it, racing one another to the Well. Racing, quite possibly, to their deaths. But for the outcast, imprisoned for his plan to tear down reality and see what lay on the other side, only the oldest Phaslair - the first, and sire of all others - now holds his fascination.
