Dice the Scrounge is a Damned Fixer, a cursed man, denied rejoining with the Faceless God he serves in return for the enjoyment of the many vices that those he ministers to on behalf of His Unseen Omniscience have forsworn. Life at World’s End, in Yugra-Sahg, the Sacred City of Supplication, is good enough for Dice—until the cruel boot treads of the one called Phane, ruined the perfect game, and, of somewhat less importance, placed Dice on a transcendent path he could quite well enough do without.

[Sequel to Supplicant Song]

Conductor Wyethstone has traveled to the depths of Foundation Seven in search of a dangerous heretic. With Foundation One and the other five pillars of Oth now lost to Time’s uncaring hand, Foundation Seven stands as the last Node of Generation, the last link to Man’s past, the residence of the last of Humanity’s seven Confessors. Will the Confessor hear his prayer and place him on the path to Conduction?

Prentice Dolphin was born an orphan and reared in the Seminary Order of Pure Intent at the Humarium of Soliloquy. Steeped in High Morality and Deep Empathy, Prentice Dolphin, 671st of his rank and fourth of his name, had long expected to be assigned to curation of the Mysteries. Such a task, edifying his mind among the Grand Calligraphies and Alchemical Masterpieces of his successors, synced with his sense of purpose and piqued his selfish thirst for the Lore of Yore, a sense of wonder concerning the days of an elder age when the Ghosts of Titans yet haunted the Ether Awe, when savage marauders scourged good lands—when a beast named Rendall stalked long-darkened halls.

Then, on October Eve, as the fearful snows roared south and east into the Lands of Men, a banner cast its shadow across the threshold of Soliloquy, a banner born by the Bannerman of Justice Claret, the Realm’s Crusader of First Renown. Something beyond respite lurked above the ever-baleful snows. More than a sword would be required to right this icy wrong. A Prentice of Soliloquy must light the inner way for the slave of the sword, to forever cast into shadow the sins of Wicked Yore.

David Able Saul is the toiling and whipped-upon son of a brutal turnip farmer, laboring within sight of the distant abbey wall. After a brief schooling in church, the only refuge he had known in his short life, with his ever-factoring clockwork mind wondering at the stations of the cross and the torments of the Christ, he had been returned to his miserable toil.

There, in far misty Anglesey, in the year foretold when the Sacred Heart of Christ would beat its last, David, half-orphan whelp of a lowly and callous man, is touched by the hand of a man he could have scarce imagined walked the sorrowed roads of Christendom... on a quest beyond its very pale.

Beyond the Pale is an epic fantasy that has only one fantastic supposition, that which is stated above, that a giant, eternally-suffering Christ moans, staked to a mountain, for the salvation of the faithful from the unearthly, mountain-locked damnation he holds back. For the beleaguered Faithful, earthly damnation takes many forms: Tartars, Arabs, Savages, Heretics, Heathens and Northmen threatening Christendom on all sides, threats that the faithful must contend with according to their God-given means, augmented by the sacred nourishment of The Sacrament.

Thus, in The Year of Our Lord, 2212, a mere three years before—as the heretic, Hyster of Bastardy foretold—the Sacred Heart would beat its last and cast Christendom into darkness, the Savior begins to wane. On this very year, David Able Saul, a serf whelp with a clockwork mind, is plucked from a turnip patch by the rakish Rosicrucian Heshman Shew Mote, one of the seven most feared men of Christendom. With Heshman as his guide, the eleven-year old savant shall come to know the Abbeys, Priories and castles of his dreams, the very Bowels of Perdition—the stark cathedral of guilt feared by all men, the wonders of the Holy See, all in route to his ultimate goal, an audience with the titanic Savior...