Light Bringer

The Reaper is a legend, more myth than man: the savior of worlds, the leader of the Rising, the breaker of chains. But the Reaper is also Darrow, born of the red soil of Mars: a husband, a father, a friend. Marooned far from home after a devastating defeat on the battlefields of Mercury, Darrow longs to return to his wife and sovereign, Virginia, to defend Mars from its bloodthirsty would-be conqueror Lysander. Lysander longs to destroy the Rising and restore the supremacy of Gold, and will raze the worlds to realize his ambitions. The worlds once needed the Reaper. But now they need Darrow, and Darrow needs the people he loves--Virginia, Cassius, Sevro--in order to defend the Republic. So begins Darrow’s long voyage home, an interplanetary adventure where old friends will reunite, new alliances will be forged, and rivals will clash on the battlefield. Because Eo’s dream is still alive--and after the dark age will come a new age: of light, of victory, of hope. Don’t miss any of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising Saga: RED RISING • GOLDEN SON • MORNING STAR • IRON GOLD • DARK AGE • LIGHT BRINGER

Autorentext

Pierce Brown is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Red Rising, Golden Son, Morning Star, Iron Gold, and Dark Age. His work has been published in thirty-four languages and thirty-six territories. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is at work on his next novel.

Klappentext

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Darrow returns as Pierce Brown’s New York Times bestselling Red Rising series continues in the thrilling sequel to Dark Age.

The Reaper is a legend, more myth than man: the savior of worlds, the leader of the Rising, the breaker of chains.

But the Reaper is also Darrow, born of the red soil of Mars: a husband, a father, a friend.

Marooned far from home after a devastating defeat on the battlefields of Mercury, Darrow longs to return to his wife and sovereign, Virginia, to defend Mars from its bloodthirsty would-be conqueror Lysander.

Lysander longs to destroy the Rising and restore the supremacy of Gold, and will raze the worlds to realize his ambitions.

The worlds once needed the Reaper. But now they need Darrow, and Darrow needs the people he loves—Virginia, Cassius, Sevro—in order to defend the Republic.

So begins Darrow’s long voyage home, an interplanetary adventure where old friends will reunite, new alliances will be forged, and rivals will clash on the battlefield.

Because Eo’s dream is still alive—and after the dark age will come a new age: of light, of victory, of hope.

Don’t miss any of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising Saga:
RED RISING • GOLDEN SON • MORNING STAR • IRON GOLD • DARK AGE • LIGHT BRINGER

Leseprobe
**1

Darrow**

*Castaway
*
Our sun floats in darkness attended by moons made of trash.

Long ago, when the planets were reshaped by mankind, the detritus of their terraforming operations was fused together into moon-­sized spheres by orbital compactors and shoved out toward Sol. Gripped by the gravity of her mass, most of these trash moons have completed their centuries-­long funeral march into the nuclear fires of the sun, but several hundred laggards still remain circling their eventual demise.

Tethered to the barren landscape of a forgotten trash moon once catalogued as Marcher-­1632, a shipwrecked corvette named the Archimedes hides in the shadow cast by a waste escarpment a kilometer high. Martian slaves-turned-­soldiers-­turned-­castaways crawl over the ship. Our welding torches flare against the hull. Our space suits are stinking bogs. We are marooned two hundred million kilometers from home, and I stew in sweat, nausea, and discontent.

That bloodydamn Bellona. That arrogant Peerless shit.

I’m going to break his knee if I ever see him again. It should be him on this hull. I’d tell him to his face, but he took the only relic in the base’s hangar that could still fly and stole off with Aurae, his Pink accomplice, while I slept. He recorded a little message telling me to tend my wounds, and left his mess behind—­his crippled ship—­for us to repair. The bastard.

More than a decade separated from Olympia’s airy sepulchres has done little to dim Cassius’s spectacular talent for condescension. Worst of all, in typical Cassius fashion, he’s taking his damn time. Six weeks he’s been gone on a mission to Starhold—­an ecliptic trade post between the orbits of Mercury and Venus—­to secure us the helium we need for the Archimedes. While here I am: either languishing in the old Sons of Ares base that’s hidden in the belly of the trash moon or latched onto the side of his ship like an industrious barnacle welding the days away, knowing time is running out.

Hades, it may already have run out.

Cut off from communication with the outside world, I have no way of knowing the course of the war I began. No way of knowing if Virginia and Victra have managed to weather the united power of the Golds of the Rim and the Core. No way of knowing if Sefi has come back to the Republic or if Lysander has used my defeat on Mercury as a ladder to the Morning Chair.

No way of knowing if the enemy has already burned Mars, my family, my home.

I think of Mars and her highland moors and whispering woods . . . 

No. Virginia told me to endure.

I’ve been imprisoned before. I know I must force away the thoughts of home before they make debris of me. Not for the first time, I try to seek refuge in anger. I want a fight. I need a fight. It’s how I’m made—­to struggle in eternal vain. But instead of a fight, instead of the forward motion that soothes my restless nature, all I get is the monotone hum of generators and the days congealing together, a litany of endless routine.

I started this war. Others are finishing it. I must escape. Atalantia must die. Atlas must die. Lysander must die. I picture them each groveling before me, my ears deaf, my hand choking the life from them as blood swells in their eyes.

The violent fantasies do nothing to ease my desolation. The anger that once made planets tremble is now toothless. Shorn of my myth by my failure, shorn of my army by my mistakes, shorn of my friends and family by the demands I made on them, I know hate will not return what I have lost or repair what I have broken.

The sun has raged for 4.6 billion years. I have raged for sixteen. No surprise, the sun has more fuel to spare. Even my anger at Cassius feels performative. I can’t sustain it anymore, can’t feed this endless anger at myself and everyone. Not after what I have done.

I escaped Mercury with my life, but it cost me my Free Legions and what remained of my self-respect. I led children of Mars to a planet far from home promising we could finish the war, only to abandon them to the enemy to save my own hide. My heart is buried with my army in those sands. But my body trudges on, as it does, no matter the ruin it leaves in its wake.

It’s been a backward slide since I fled Mercury with my small band of survivors. Cassius rescued barely two hundred of us from Heliopolis, but it was not a clean escape. Harried by Grimmus torchShips, we missed our rendezvous with the Telemanus fleet. Missed our chance home. We barely managed to limp into the base on the Marcher before Cassius took off.

The silence is broken by the chatter of the other welders. One tells a joke. It’s funny enough for me to stop flagellating myself. I listen to the other voices. They remind me of the drillboys chattering in the tunnel above my clawDrill…