Okay, here’s my really serious effort to get Lady Tehre into the back cover description. What do you think?
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The cold mages of Casmantium began a war against the griffins. They lost.
As the griffins’ fiery winds bury his city beneath the burning sands of the desert, Gereint Enseichen, a skilled maker bound under the Casmantian geas of servitude, seizes his chance to escape. This isn’t his war — and he sees no reason it should be. Yet when Gereint finds himself caught between the fury of the griffins and the desperate designs of the last Casmantian mage, he’ll have no choice but to set his newfound freedom at hazard or see his country destroyed.
Tehre Amnachudran, brilliant mathematician and engineer, is far more interested in constructing bridges than in battle. But when she encounters Gereint, she finds herself pulled into a war she never expected to fight. Her skills seem ill-suited to war, yet as the blazing storm breaks across Casmantium, she, too, must set every skill she owns between her country and deadly peril.
Time is short, for Casmantium is already turning to desert below the fiery storm …
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Is there a good synonym for “fiery” that would work either in the first sentence or the last?
I’ve already used “burning” and “blazing.” To me, “incandescent” doesn’t quite work. Scorching, ablaze with, hmm.
But, overall, this seems pretty decent to me. Comments welcome!
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What sticks with me for the griffin winds is their heat, so ‘scorching’ and “sizzling” as replacements for fiery would work. hmm… Time is short for Casmantium is already turning to desert below the searing storm.. too many ‘s’ sounds, or not?
here’s a vocabulary stretcher (I’ve poked around dictionaries and thesaurii: calescent. increasing in heat. Which I don’t think works in this back cover copy, but would like a chance to use it somewhere.
Okay, how about this? I’ve just moved some things around a bit – and I’ve described the storm as the “griffins’ storm” in the last sentence, since it’s already clear from the first paragraph that the storm = fiery winds. And I made the details of WHAT Gerient is caught in the middle of a bit more vague. I don’t think we really need to know that he gets involved with the last Casmantian mage from the back cover blurb. Leave it as a surprise! All we really need to know at the Blurb stage is that he doesn’t care to be involved in the mess… and that he gets stuck being involved anyway. Or at least that’s what I think.
Good to see Tehre in there, though! She’s a protagonist in her own right… and leaving her out didn’t feel right.
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The cold mages of Casmantium began a war against the griffins. They lost.
As the griffins’ fiery winds bury his city beneath the burning sands of the desert, Gereint Enseichen, a skilled maker bound under the Casmantian geas of servitude, seizes his chance to escape. This isn’t his war — and he sees no reason it should be – until he finds himself caught between the warring sides.
Tehre Amnachudran, brilliant mathematician and engineer, is far more interested in constructing bridges than in battle. But when she encounters Gereint, she finds herself pulled into a war she never expected to fight – despite her ill-suited skills.
Casmantium is already turning to desert below the griffins’ storm. Time is short.