The Spine of Night (2021)

The story begins with the witch-queen Tzod ascending a snowy mountain. At its peak, in a giant skull, she confronts the guardian of a mystic flower known as the Bloom. While the guardian initially threatens her and tries to drive her away, she shows an identical flower, explaining that her people had found where it had cast a seed long ago.

She then begins to tell the events that have led her here, which largely concern a renegade scholar named Ghal-Sur. After both he and Tzod are thrown in the prison of a young tyrant, she uses the power of the Bloom to help them escape. Shortly thereafter, Ghal-Sur murders the queen and steals the Bloom from her; when he returns to his fellow scholars at a place of study called The Pantheon.

Some time later, starving peasants mass at The Pantheons gates and, despite the protest of a warrior monk named Phae-Agura, the head Inquisitor insists on keeping the gates locked. The Inquisitor consults with Ghal-Sur, who is locked in a dungeon, and is convinced to assist as he performs a ritual to unlock more of the Bloom's power. Phaeo-Agura is killed trying to stop the Inquisitor who dies after absorbing too much power and massacres both peasants and his own people.

Ghal-Sur escapes and then becomes a tyrant in his own right, marching armies across the countryside and eventually using the Bloom to create great war machines and a following of slaves and fanatics to expand his conquest. An unknown number of years later, a trio of assassins attempts to stop him, managing only to incinerate his stores of the Bloom instead preventing God Emperor Ghal-Sur from resurrecting some of his followers; the last trace of it travels downstream until it finds the corpse of Tzod, resurrecting her and driving her to seek the guardian as she did in the beginning.

The Guardian also tells the story of the Bloom itself: The giant skull it rests in was the last god before men killed it, but even that god was the progeny of a greater god, whose severed head formed the world, and the Bloom communicates to those who bear it that this cycle goes on upward and upward without end, eternal and violent. The Guardian Tzod meets is only the most recent, as they exist in their own cycle: many come seeking the bloom, and each guardian has discovered the bloom, learned its secrets, and concluded its knowledge is unbearable to the world at large. Each Guardian has defended the bloom for the rest of their lives, until they became too weary, and allowed themselves to be felled by a prospective seeker of the Bloom who learns the massive truth of the universe and decides to conceal it, becoming the next Guardian. It is revealed that the present Guardian had breathed across the Bloom when he first learned its truth, and was the one to initially spread seeds of it.

In the present, Tzod beckons Ghal-Sur to the mountain peak where the Bloom rests, and while his soldiers quickly mortally wound her, she is able to use the Bloom's power to raise the bodies of the previous guardians, who butcher the soldiers and allow Tzod to deal a deathblow to Ghal-Sur. She is incinerated by the release of power, her skull spinning out into the stars like that of the god who formed the world, while the seeds of the Bloom scatter on the wind.