Excerpts - Newton and Jordan/Sanderson

If you want a little taste of two series finale coming to a library near you from now (The Broken Iles, the final novel in the Legends of the Red Sun series by Mark Charan Newton was released on July 5th in the UK) to January of next year (A Memory of Light, the final volume in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson), you have been served.  Here's a glimpse of both and the links for the full excerpts\extracts from Tor US and UK.

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A Memory of Light - Chapter one

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning. 

Eastward the wind blew, descending from lofty mountains and coursing over desolate hills.  It passed into the place known as the Westwood, an area that had once flourished with pine and leatherleaf. Here, the wind found little more than tangled underbrush, thick save around an occasional towering oak.  Those looked stricken by disease, bark peeling free, branches drooping. Elsewhere needles had fallen from pines, draping the ground in a brown blanket.  None of the skeletal branches of the Westwood put forth buds. 

North and eastward the wind blew, across underbrush that crunched and cracked as it shook.  It was night, and scrawny foxes picked over the rotting ground, searching in vain for prey or carrion. No spring birds had come to call, and—most telling—the howls of wolves had gone silent across the land. 

The wind blew out of the forest and across Taren Ferry. What was left of it.  The town had been a fine one, by local standards. Dark buildings, tall above their redstone foundations, a cobbled street, built at the mouth of the land known as the Two Rivers. 

The smoke had long since stopped rising from burned buildings, but there was little left of the town to rebuild.  Feral dogs hunted through the rubble for meat.  They looked up as the wind passed, their eyes hungry.

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The Broken Iles - Prologue

Jeza left the city alone and headed along the coast on horseback. 

It was early, and her head pounded from a hangover. She was still a little dazed from all the cheap alcohol, furious with herself for having left her dagger somewhere under a table, and still contemplating whether or not her partner, Diggsy, was actually playing around behind her back. She should not have gone out, not with a dawn start ahead of her, but it seemed a good way of forgetting about those gestures, those second glances and the sudden in-jokes she didn’t understand. 

Jeza was an hour out of the city, far away from the comforting stone walls of her home, Factory 54, which she shared with a group of friends. She had left them there, too, deciding that this lead was one she should explore on her own.

The road south, along the coastline, was quiet. To her left, the chalk cliffs rose up from the sea; down below the surf ground upon the rocks. There were few clouds, and the sun cast its long bloodorange rays across the skies. Jeza pulled her green woollen shawl around her shoulders more tightly. Her breeches were thick, as were her boots – a present from Diggsy for her recent seventeenth birthday – so at least she was prepared for the rawest of conditions. As it happened, just a gentle breeze was all that challenged Jeza and her mare that morning.

One day, she thought, I’ll be able to live far away from the city. I’ll be able to be out here, with my relics and my theories, and not have to scrape a living in Villiren – what’s left of it anyway.