The greatest author of our age, Reul Tomala, has released his long-awaited sequel to the novel Deliverance of Salvation.

Where DoS focused on the personal journey of elves and spirits as they journeyed through a war-beaten realm, his new novel, The Far Reaches, focuses on the setting; the titular Far Reaches.

The world is similar to ours. The starry sky, the vibrantly glowing plants, volcanoes explode to bring heat, and geysers shoot water into the sky which becomes rain. But while our world is a globe, The Far Reaches is flat and expands forever. The elves have conquered for eons and eons, nobody knows how many armies there are, there is no map of the Elven Empire, and even the population count is a mystery.

The Far Reaches novel is an anthology depicting the history of this world and its people. Most civilians toil in farms and workshops and don’t realize they’re part of an empire until a recruiter shows up and drafts half the village. The imperial elite are decadent and backstabbing, throwing thousands of lives away in petty squabbles. The soldiers and commanders can’t fathom that there should be a reason to conquer, or that slaughtering a tribe of orphans isn’t a victory worth celebrating.

The protagonist of one story is a young elf who gets drafted. Many stories later, his mother is the protagonist. Soldiers approach her village and she thinks she’ll see her son again, but it’s a separate imperial army who didn’t realize, or care, that the region had already been conquered.

One story saw an elf achieve a happy ending. A hundred cycles later he was killed in an unrelated campaign.

The world is dark, bleak, the wounds are self-inflicted, and it’s far beyond the capacity of the elves to fix on their own.