The Tower on the Rift
core novel 1998 The Three Worlds Cycle
Record
| First published | 1998 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.95 (2,541 ratings, collected 2026-10-09) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780648186984 |
| Internal chronology | 2 |
Synopsis
The city of Thurkad has fallen, and Karan, driven toward madness by a forbidden spell, has been left for dead. Llian the tale-teller has been carried off by Tensor, the renegade leader of the Aachim, who means to use the twisted Mirror of Aachan for a vengeance a thousand years in the making, and who knows how to exploit Llian's one fatal weakness: his hunger to find and tell a Great Tale of his own. Karan, recovering, sets out to rescue her friend and retake the mirror, and allies and enemies alike pursue Tensor across the pitiless desert of the Dry Sea to Katazza, a lost fortress of power built over the Rift. There, forbidden magic drives a desperate man to a monumental folly, and the mirror looses forces that could change the fate of all three worlds, unless Karan can hold off the madness that curses her family.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Three Worlds Cycle
- Series: The View from the Mirror core; position 2 of 4 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Ian Irvine
Notes
- From the series record (The View from the Mirror): Ian Irvine's first Three Worlds quartet: the chronicler Llian and the sensitive Karan, drawn into a three-thousand-year-old struggle between the immortals of the three human races trapped on Santhenar since the Way Between the Worlds was shattered, and the Mirror of Aachan that can reveal it.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The View from the Mirror: position 2 of 4: previous A Shadow on the Glass (1998) · next Dark is the Moon (1999)
- Internal chronology, within The Three Worlds Cycle: position 5 of 15: previous The Summon Stone (2016) · next Tetrarch (2002)
Sources
- Ian Irvine (official site)
- Fantasy Literature (review)
- Ian Irvine (official site)
- Ian Irvine (official booklist)
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