Long ago Earth’s paleobiologists established the planet Anee as a vast storehouse of extinct species, each continent home to life forms of a different era. For a thousand years the starfarers’ great sea serpents formed a wall of teeth and flesh that protected Smilodon Bay from the ravaging dinosaurs that swam across the ocean from Hotland. Now the serpents are gone and Anee is being ravaged by tyranny, war and slavery.
Tull, son to a human father and a Neanderthal mother, feels doomed to toil his life away as a common field hand, but his mission becomes clear when he takes action to save his homeland. Tull must seek a distant river in the slave nation of Craal, where young serpents can be found. Legend has it that Adjonai, the Neanderthal god of terror, is king of Craal. Yet only by facing this dark enemy can Tull hope to bring home his serpent catch alive.
This is the first installment of a four part series. Originally published under the name “Dave Wolverton.”

David Farland is an award-winning, international best-selling author with over 50 novels in print. He has won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Special Award for “Best Novel in the English Language” for his science fiction novel On My Way to Paradise, the Whitney Award for “Best Novel of the Year” for his historical novel In the Company of Angels, and he has won over seven awards—including the International Book Award and the Hollywood Book Festival, Grand Prize—for his fantasy thriller Nightingale. He is best known, however, for his New York Times best-selling fantasy series The Runelords, which will soon be made into a graphic novel and, likely, a movie. Farland has written for major franchises such as Star Wars and The Mummy. In the video game industry, he has been both a designer and a scripter and was the co-leader on the design team for StarCraft: Brood War. As a writing instructor, Farland has mentored dozens who have gone on to staggering literary success, including such #1 New York Times Bestsellers as Brandon Mull (Fablehaven), Brandon Sanderson (Wheel of Time), James Dashner (The Maze Runner) and Stephenie Meyer (Twilight). Farland judges L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future, perhaps the largest worldwide writing competition for new fantasy and science fiction authors. He has worked in Hollywood greenlighting movies and doctoring scripts. He set the Guinness World Record for the largest single-author, single-book signing. David Farland has been hailed as “The wizard of storytelling” and his work has been called “compelling,” “engrossing,” “powerful,” “profound,” and “ultimately life-changing.”