Sovereign Sacrifice

Book four of Air Awakens: Vortex Chronicles

They should've never met. She's the crown princess. He's a mysterious sorcerer. But the unexpected happens when the world is ending. When Crown Princess Vi Solaris finds out she has a rare and deadly power, she must make a choice: Her magic or her throne. But the choice isn't as simple as it appears, because her magic is the key to saving the world. As her Empire falters from political infighting and a deadly plague, Vi trains in secret under a deadly sorcerer from a distant land. From his pointed ears to enchanting eyes and silver tongue, he's nothing like anyone she's ever met before. Vi knows she should fear him and his shadowed past, but he may just be the only one who really knows what's happening to her. Locked together with the fate of a dying world, Vi sets off to uncover the truth of a magic that wasn't made for mortal hands. But the ultimate triumph will require the ultimate sacrifice. Once Vi embarks on her epic journey of adventure, romance, family, and duty, there will be no turning back. This omnibus edition contains all five books in the Air Awakens: Vortex Chronicles series by USA Today bestselling author Elise Kova.

Sacrificial Limbs chronicles the everyday lives and political activism of disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war, one of the most volatile conflicts in the Middle East. Through nuanced ethnographic portraits, Açiksöz examines how veterans’ experiences of war and disability are closely linked to class, gender, and ultimately the embrace of ultranationalist right-wing politics. Bringing the reader into military hospitals, commemorations, political demonstrations, and veterans’ everyday spaces of care, intimacy, and activism, Sacrificial Limbs provides a vivid analysis of the multiple and sometimes contradictory forces that fashion veterans’ bodies, political subjectivities, and communities. It is essential reading for students and scholars interested in anthropology, masculinity, and disability.

Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating “states of exception”—that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it—Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism. Developing this close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.

The fate of the war-decimated kingdom of Hytanica falls into the hands of a former queen who is secretly in love with her enemy and a rebel who seeks retribution for her family's losses.

Choose wisely! Alana wasn’t ready to forfeit her carefree life as a village maiden, but the Great Tree chose her to be its honored woodsinger. Now, she communes daily with the Tree, conveying its ancient wisdom to her people on the Headland of Slaughter. Alas, even the Tree fails to recognize the threat when Duke Coren arrives from the mainland. Soon, two innocent children are kidnapped, carried off to distant Smithcourt for reasons unknown. Alana wastes no time provisioning a rescue party, giving them a treasured woodstar so she can observe and guide their progress. But a trio of fishermen is no match for a wily inland noble—especially one capable of manipulating the captured twins’ emotions until they no longer want to be saved. What must Alana—and others—sacrifice to bring the children home? If you like fantasy novels with magic, mystical trees, kidnapping of innocents, children in danger, sword and sorcery, epic stories, sagas, power, intrigue, and betrayal, then this is the book for you! 011823mfm

Vi Solaris must learn to master her magic or forfeit her throne. But when a watch links her with a magical traveler and the fate of their dying world, Vi learns there's a greater destiny than even her birthright. Book one in a young adult, epic fantasy series from USA Today Bestselling author Elise Kova, set in her acclaimed Air Awakens world.

New author, E. L. Glenn, takes you on an intriguing journey through a reality that contains multiple, parallel universes. Though there are uncountable universes, there is only one Nexus Universe. The progenitor universe from which all the others have originated from. Those within the Nexus Universe have the ‘ability’ to enter any of the others. The Nexus Universe has a problem though, a man named Hessler, who embodies the ‘Antithesis’ spirit, has made it his quest to conquer not only the Nexus Universe, but the other parallel universes as well. To achieve this, Hessler has been using an army comprised of men and orcs, numbering a million. He must also attain the ‘Crystal Sword’, an incredible source of power. The ‘Crystal Sword’ had been hidden in the caverns of one of the kingdoms of the dwarves. Protecting it are wizards, men, elves and the dwarves themselves. They cannot use the ‘Sword’, only one embodied with either the ‘Antithesis’ spirit, or the ‘Sovereign’ Spirit can, and the one embodied with the ‘Sovereign’ spirit, is in another universe. They must find him in the hope of stopping Hessler. Mariah, a searcher in the caverns, has found the prophecy that will lead them to the universe that the ‘Sovereign’ is in. Taking it to the seekers, Mariah is informed that she must be the one to enter the ‘Sovereigns’ universe and bring him to them. There isn’t much time and they have no idea what the ‘Sovereign’ will be like, but he is their only hope. Hessler and his orc army, are almost upon them.

Sovereign Attachments rethinks sovereignty by moving it out of the exclusive domain of geopolitics and legality and into cultural, religious, and gender studies. Through a close reading of a stunning array of cultural texts produced by the Pakistani state and the Pakistan-based Taliban, Shenila Khoja-Moolji theorizes sovereignty as an ongoing attachment that is negotiated in public culture. Both the state and the Taliban recruit publics into relationships of trust, protection, and fraternity by summoning models of Islamic masculinity, mobilizing kinship metaphors, and marshalling affect. In particular, masculinity and Muslimness emerge as salient performances through which sovereign attachments are harnessed. The book shifts the discussion of sovereignty away from questions about absolute dominance to ones about shared repertoires, entanglements, and co-constitution.

When worlds collide, and things are rarely what they seem, there may be no one Vi can trust. Having forsaken her crown for a chance to save her family, and the world, Vi Solaris washes up on the shores of Meru. She's wounded and barely alive. But Vi's fight for survival is only just beginning. As a princess in a foreign land, everyone is after her. The pirate queen Adela wants to sell her to the evil elfin'ra. The Twilight King wants to use her to settle an old score. And, perhaps most dangerous, is the scheming Lord of the Faithful who sees her as an opportunity to further consolidate his power. The only path for Vi is forward. But she doesn't yet know if she's running toward salvation... or a brutal end to everything she loves. Vi's journey continues with even more betrayal, romance, and magic.