Songs of the Firstborn is a five-book epic fantasy series in the Tolkien register — careful, earnest, and built on the conviction that what a world forgets about itself matters as much as what it remembers. Here is everything you need to decide if it is for you.
The Collapse happened three millennia ago. No one alive knows exactly what was lost — only that the world has been wrong in a low, persistent way ever since, and that something at the edges of the known world is spreading. A Wrenfolk record-keeper named Sable Dunmore finds a stone tablet in a flooded basement. It is written in a script that should not exist. What begins as a record-keeper's puzzle becomes the first step toward waking the oldest living being in the world — and asking the question the world has been too frightened to ask for three thousand years.
A stone tablet surfaces in a flooded basement in Ashfen, a quiet market town where nothing unusual has happened in living memory. It is wrapped in oilskin, carefully placed — which means someone put it there deliberately — and inscribed in a script that Sable Dunmore, keeper of records for the town of Ashfen, cannot read. He is very good at his work. He has never encountered anything he cannot file.
He files it anyway, under uncertain provenance, origin unknown, language unidentified. He notes that the stone is heavier than it should be for its size. He notes that it does not behave the way stone behaves. He notes that something about the script is familiar in a way he cannot account for. He writes all of this down because writing things down is what Sable does, and then he begins to find out who can read it.
This is a mistake, in the sense that it sets in motion everything that follows. It is also the only possible response for a man who has spent his entire career insisting that accurate records matter, and who has just found something the record does not contain.
The road north is longer than he expected. The mountain is older than anyone knew. What is sleeping inside it has been waiting — not for rescue, and not for heroes. For someone willing to ask the right question and then write down the answer, however inconvenient the answer turns out to be.
Five books. Three continents. One truth the world has been forgetting for three thousand years.
Explore the SeriesSix companions who did not choose each other, and one Drevari who has been waiting long enough to be particular about who wakes him.
Meet the CompanyThree continents. A collapsed civilization. And a void that spreads through what a world forgets rather than what it remembers.
Explore the WorldValdenmoor, Thurak, and the continent the current maps do not show the interior of.
See the MapsLore, language, races, customs, and the full history of the Sundered Age — for readers who want the world behind the story.
Open the CompanionThe ancient script of the Drevari — the language that predates everything the younger races know, and that the stone tablet is written in.
The Script Reference