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Pub date March 16, 2025

ISBN 979-8314371770

Price $6.99 (USD) Paperback, $2.99 Kindle edition

Book excerpt

A spiritually charged Martian war epic finds a reluctant young leader facing extinction, resurrection, and a machine god with no soul in Kristof’s series finale. On the scorched edges of post-Creator Mars, 17-year-old Miri, known as the Star Bearer, fights to protect what’s left of a fragile peace. With cities burning and Defilers striking with renewed cruelty, she’s pulled into a mission to uncover the origins of a series of attacks and rescue missing women abducted by a cult-like faction bent on control. Her journey leads her into the haunted ruins of humanity’s past, where the lines between man, machine, and memory collapse, and where a buried god waits to be awakened. 

Kristof writes with cinematic precision and philosophical depth, lingering as much on blistering gunfire as on the quiet ache of prayer.  Miri, tactically adept, emotionally raw, and increasingly aware of the heavy title she bears, remains at the heart of the story. Her bond with Raven reaches its tragic crescendo in this volume. Raven’s slow decline gives the story its most heart-wrenching thread. The Reclaimer, an entity of chilling logic and godlike arrogance, poses not just a physical threat but an existential one, asking what right synthetic beings have to feel, to remember, to love. The ending is luminous and defiant that insists on hope not as a given, but as a choice—fought for and carried forward.

A slender, mournful, and unforgettable close to a saga that never stops asking what it means to endure.

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