A few moments of indiscretion at her elite academy results in Nadenya being banished from her father's estate for two months. During her travel across the burning sand of The Barrens, an attack rips her from the train. Traded by the raiders, she fin...
A few moments of lowered values at her elite academy results in Nadenya being sent away from her father's estate for two months. Her father refuses her pleas to let her stay, instead banishing her to months of train travel in a world of burning sand, sun, and relentless heat in the outcasted barren lands.
It isn't what Nadenya thought she deserved for a little indiscretion, but her father's Old Order word is rule in her austere homeland city.
But Nadenya's two-month trip by train through dry desert lands is cut short. At sword point, the train is attacked, every valuable emptied, and the best of everything carried away to be laid at the feet of the master of Mosaya. Among those valuables is a very frightened, very weary Nadenya.
War and sometimes history are not pretty, despite who tells or rewords the stories.
In the year 2341, after centuries of the world taking a turn in 1929, history has rewritten world outcomes. In this future, Nadenya, cultured and groomed for marriage to the highest ranks of new steam-industrialized Anglia Proper, now finds herself veiled and draped in silk and silver in a land she was taught had perished long ago. In a hidden world behind barred windows, she discovers the truth of a forgotten history.
With rumors of war and old scars remembered, she also realizes she is not the only captive secreted in the desert haven.
Post World War IV.
Less than half a century after a second Great War was narrowly avoided, the nations have reorganized, enforced boundaries, and withdrawn into their perspective corners, condemning and ignoring the rest of the world, entrenched in their distinctive beliefs.
Centuries later . . .
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Anglia Proper
Former England, France, Germany regions Year 2341
The house seemed to have grown since Nadenya had last seen it. The halls echoed vacantly, the walls tall and looming, shedding cold light in through the narrow, filtered city in which their large house was located. When the trains ran for hours straight during the morning and afternoon hours, the steam was thick, and in the summer, as now, nearly unbearable, even with the windows closed.
And they were almost always closed. That was something her father insisted upon.
The house itself was a namesake, built in the same century the Great Mind had passed away from what was largely considered an assassination.
"What heights the Great Thinker would have raised their fatherland to," she mumbled in mock sternness, tossing out the phrase her father would say often. "If the Great War had been waged twenty years hence, Anglia Proper would have embraced the world and ruled it as the Great Mind had imagined."
Few spoke the real name of the Great Mind. Some out of reverence. Some out of clandestine embarrassment at one future the world had escaped.
Those in this last school of thought had guessed through history where that Great Mind would have taken the former nation once known as Germany. Those embracing the first school of thought in history claimed that surely no one would have followed any leader of any nation into such a dark possible future.
