The Bridge to Magic

by Alex Thornbury

Overview

2022 Royal Dragonfly Award Winner for Science Fiction/Fantasy

The Blight. The end of Mankind. The Bridge that may be salvation or the final betrayal.

Magic is treacherous, it lied to them all...

In this grimdark fantasy, magic and its guardians have been banished to the Deadlands and the Blight threatens mankind's survival. Terren, the last remaining city, stands alone against its relentless advance. Ever closer draws the choice they all must make: face the deadly Blight or cross the Bridge to Magic.

Elika, an orphan on Terren's streets, hates and fears the dark bridge. Many who try to cross, perish. Some reach the other side, only to become motionless shadows in the vast, lifeless landscape of the Deadlands, their true fate unknown.Like everyone else, Elika clings to the hope that purging every lingering echo of magic from the world can stop the Blight.

Then she discovers that magic is hiding within her, and through her it seeks to enact the will of its own. Everything Elika knew about her past shatters, as long-buried secrets about her true birth emerge. Accused of being a mage, many doubt her loyalties. Her gang turns against her. The one man she thought she could trust and love, abandons her.

Hunted and alone, Elika must soon decide: Either destroy the magic inside her or cross the bridge to her own uncertain end. But what awaits them in the Deadlands where the enemy of mankind roams wild?

The Bridge to Magic is a dark and intriguing story of a life between two deaths and an impossible choice to make. It is a tale of hope and survival in a world where neither seems possible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780645497007
Publisher:	Shadow Lore Publishing
Publication date:	02/21/2023
Series:	The Sundered Web , #1
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.97(d)

About the Author

Alex Thornbury is an award-winning author. She grew up in Cheshire UK, and developed deep love of history and fantasy thanks to the many castles she visited as a child. Though she grew up to be an Alchemist by trade, she never stopped fantasizing about other worlds, dragons and epic battles. She has abandoned her Alchemy and potion making career, and is now a full time author. Her debut fantasy book, The Bridge to Magic, has won the 2022Royal Dragonfly book award for Science Fiction/Fantasy.

Editorial Reviews

2023-04-17
Thornbury’s debut YA fantasy novel features a girl on the run fighting to suppress her forbidden magic in a dying world.

The fantastical realm of Seramight is slowly succumbing to the Blight, a creeping malaise that kills anything it touches. When the city of Drasdark falls, only Terren remains, a final, multicultural refuge of haves and have-nots nestled between a long-drained sea and a bottomless chasm that separates the world of men from the magic-infused Deadlands. A single bridge—which is a living organism—spans the intervening gap. Those who tire of life may cross it, either dying at the midpoint or passing on and receding by degrees into the bleakness beyond. None ever return. Elika, who is 15 years old, watches the bridge, identifying those who cross so that her pack of street orphans can loot that person’s lodgings for coin and food. Life in Terren is hard, but Eli is surviving. Terren’s priests have long blamed magic for the Blight; to this end, they have decreed the living bridge’s destruction, but all attempts have failed. Eli, however, wounds it when she stabs it. This reveals her to be not merely infected with magic (an “Echo” in the local parlance), but a creature in full possession of it. Suddenly, the Blight hastens its encroachment. The people of Terren turn against the Echoes, first purging them with blood-salt before resorting to more violent measures. Eli wants her magic gone, yet she cannot rid herself of it—the harder she tries, the worse the situation becomes. Is there no way she can save herself, her pack, and her city?

The author writes in the third person, past tense from Eli’s perspective. The prose is a proficient blend of narrative action, inner reflection, and mostly naturalistic dialogue. Eli is an unusual protagonist: On the one hand she exhibits standard heroic traits (courage, determination, loyalty, compassion). On the other, she rails fiercely against her expected role. Rather than embracing the power within her, she clings stubbornly to what she’s been taught, risking her life and submitting to torture in her efforts to be cleansed. Thornbury’s depiction of magic—and Eli’s true nature—is as artful as the plot is pessimistic. There is little to feel good about in the barbaric acts the people of Terren suffer as the Blight approaches. The author neither glosses over these atrocities nor revels in them; instead, the reader is presented with a morose, almost moribund sense of inevitability. Humanity’s plight goes from bad to worse, ever spiraling downward. The effect is cheerless yet oddly refreshing in a genre that so often fails to make good on its threats. Eli’s journey can be read as a parallel to the emotional progression of one caring for a terminally ill relative. She passes through stages of loss, and the end is a foregone conclusion, yet it brings a kind of catharsis, clearing the way for new beginnings. Hard-bitten fantasists should approve.

A grim and despairing yet elegiac fantasy tale and unsentimental testament to humanity’s enduring spirit.

Kirkus Reviews