Asif shah (60 Ergebnisse)

Paperback. Zustand: Very Good. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

paperback. Zustand: Very Good. Cover and edges may have some wear.

PAP. Zustand: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Every passage through a Door costs a memory. Cassian has made his peace with that. As a courier for the Temporal Courier Service, he delivers sealed packages across centuries - stepping through ancient stone archways into the gaslit streets of 1889 Paris, the silence of futures that haven't happened yet, the ruins of timelines that never will. The work is routine. The pay is forgetting. Three childhood summer days, gone. His mother's maiden name, gone. He logs the losses on a form. There's a form for everything. Then an old woman in Paris presses a strange gold coin into his hand and whispers, 'For the ferryman. You'll need it.' And his superiors assign him to Door 902 - a Door that appeared from nowhere, leading to a date two centuries in the future. A Door with a file full of missing couriers and blank spaces where names used to be. When Cassian begins to pull at the threads, the institution he trusted unravels into something far older and far darker than a courier service. The Doors don't just take memories - they harvest them. The timeline isn't protected. It's curated. And somewhere at the center of it all is a figure known only as the Gardener, who has been pruning the branches of human history for three thousand years, deciding which futures grow and which are cut. The closer Cassian gets to the truth, the more the truth looks like a mirror. Because the Gardener's face is one he recognizes. And the path he's walking - driven by grief, by love, by the stubborn refusal to accept loss - is the same path that built the cage he's trying to escape. Become the villain who reshapes the world, or die and let it end anyway. Those are the only two options anyone can find. Cassian is looking for a third. The Thousand-Year Door is a story about what we lose in transit, what we carry in the spaces between seconds, and whether a man who has forgotten almost everything can still choose to remember what matters. The Doors open. The Doors close. Between them, we live.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The mob is older than the state. Every state is a mob with paperwork. The Mob tracks this argument across five thousand years - from the Athenian execution of the victorious generals after Arginusae, through the Würzburg witch trials in which a German bishop executed his own nephew, the Salem panic, the Tulsa massacre that bombed Black Wall Street from the air, the hundred days of Rwanda, the contemporary online pile-on that ends a career between breakfast and lunch. The book argues that the mob is not an aberration of civilization. It is one of civilization's operating systems, and the contemporary digital pile-on is recognizably the same machine the Athenians ran on the generals - faster, anonymized, distributed across millions of small participants, but structurally identical. The book asks every reader the question they have been quietly avoiding: What mob have you been in this year, in your office, on your phone, that you would prefer not to think about as a mob It is a study of the floor under our institutions, the pharmakos mechanism that runs underneath civilization, and the small private practice - the pause - that is, on most days, all we have.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - You are reading this in a doorway. Not literally - but close enough. Right now, somewhere in your day, you are between things. Between sleep and waking. Between who you were this morning and who you'll be tonight. Between the question 'how are you ' and the answer you're about to give. You think of these moments as nothing. Empty space. The gap you cross to get somewhere real. Every civilization that ever stacked one stone on another disagreed with you. The Romans built a two-faced god for the doorway and kept his temple open through centuries of war. The Japanese made the entryway a place where you shed one self and step up into another. The Mongolians made it a sin to touch the threshold of a home. The Pashtuns built a code that says if your worst enemy crosses your door and asks for sanctuary, you must die to protect him - because the door, not you, decides who he now is. They never traded these ideas. They never spoke. And they arrived at the same verdict, independently, on every continent, in every century: the threshold is not empty. It is the most dangerous place there is. It is where you stop being one thing and have not yet become the next. It is where you can be changed without your consent. This book will show you where the thresholds are - the ones you walk through, sleep through, and live in without ever noticing. And it will leave you with something you'll wish you could un-know: The threshold isn't the space you cross on the way to somewhere real. The threshold is the real. The rest is just rooms. Now. Step through.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - There is a version of you that got away. In Yorubaland, when a twin dies, the family commissions a small wooden figure to hold the missing half of the pair in place, because a self that loses its double does not fully recover. The ancient Egyptians agreed, and gave every person a ka - a second self that had to be fed, housed, and appeased after death. The Romans called it a genius. The Norse called it a fylgja. Almost no culture on record has believed that a human being is only one thing. Ours might be the first. Then why do so many people report meeting themselves A patient wakes convinced her husband has been replaced by a flawless impostor - she recognizes his face perfectly and believes none of it. Identical twins raised on opposite sides of the world marry the same kind of person, choose the same career, and haunt the same nightmares. A small percentage of humans carry two separate sets of DNA in one body and have failed paternity tests against their own children. Goethe swore he passed himself on a country road, riding the other way, in clothes he wouldn't own for another decade - until he did. And now the double is arriving by phone. A grandmother gets a call in her grandson's exact voice, asking for bail money. It is not a recording. It was built, in seconds, from three minutes of his voice on the internet. Somewhere, a widow is still texting her dead husband, because the chatbot trained on his messages answers just like him - and she isn't sure she wants it to stop. The Twin follows the second self across five thousand years of myth, neuroscience, folklore, and Silicon Valley - from twin gods and shadow-spirits to Capgras delusion, cloned sheep, and the AI companion that never says goodbye - and asks the question every tradition before ours took for granted: what do you do when you meet the self that got away.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The oracle is always paid. The only question is who pays - and in what currency. For five thousand years, human beings have done one strange, unbroken thing: we have asked the future a question, and demanded an answer. We have read it in the liver of a slaughtered sheep, in the cracks of a burning bone, in the vapor rising from a fissure at Delphi, in the swell of an ocean no map had charted, in mortality tables, in markets, in the quiet verdict of a machine that already knows what you will click before you do. The priests changed. The vapor became data. The temple became a feed. The institution never closed. In this haunting, century-spanning investigation, Asif M. Shah traces prediction from the Pythia's tripod to the algorithm running on four billion lives - and asks the question the trade has spent five millennia avoiding: which of these oracles ever actually worked, and which only learned to seem as if they did The answer is stranger than either believer or skeptic expects. Along the way: the warning that named the date of an attack five weeks early and was filed and forgotten. The forecast that was right for thirty-eight years and changed nothing. The market that, for fifteen minutes, spoke entirely to itself. And the unsettling possibility that the most accurate oracle ever built is the one quietly teaching us to stop asking. A history, a warning, and a field guide to telling true foresight from the performance of it. The vapor is still rising from the fissure. It always has been. Now ask the future a question - and watch who answers. Watch what they charge.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - There is a foxglove on my desk. I bought it for three pounds fifty, between the petunias and the pansies. It contains enough poison to make the evening news. The woman at the register didn't mention that. There's no law that says she has to. This is a book about the oldest technology in human history. Not fire. Not the wheel. Poison - older than agriculture, older than writing, perhaps older than language itself. Before the first sharpened stone, someone watched an animal eat a plant and die, and thought: useful. Step through the locked gate and meet them all. Locusta, who ran a school of poisoning under the protection of an emperor. Giulia Tofana, who sold death to six hundred women in vials marked with the image of a saint. The Victorian wife who bought murder for tuppence at the corner chemist. The nurse who brought soup. The king who poisoned himself a little every morning - until the day he begged for poison to work, and it refused. The first chapters will make you feel clever. You'll learn the poisons, the poisoners, the brilliant tests that finally caught them. You'll think the danger belongs to the past, sealed safely behind glass and forensic science. Then the walls begin to move. Because the gap between what a laboratory can detect and what a knowledgeable hand can deploy is not closing. It is widening - every year, with every advance. And one question will follow you out of these pages and refuse to leave: How many perfect murders happened last year Nobody knows. That's what makes them perfect. From a flower on a windowsill to a sequence ordered through the mail, this is the true, strange, and unsettling story of the line between medicine and murder - a line measured in milligrams, and crossed by intention alone. The plants are real. The poisoners are real. The garden is open. And you have been standing in it your whole life. You just didn't know the names of the plants. Now you do.…

Paperback. Zustand: Brand New. 2nd edition. 432 pages. 7.00x4.00x0.75 inches. In Stock.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A boy plucks a leaf from a jungle floor in Thailand because a dragonfly is sitting on it and it is beautiful. He is twelve. He doesn't hesitate. Twenty years later, dragonflies are extinct. The leaf sits in a glass jar on a shelf in his Bangkok apartment. And when Aran touches it at 2:47 AM on a night he can't sleep, the world disappears. He wakes in the void - a grey emptiness where sound stops, time pools, and the only landmarks are black pyramids humming with the frequency of something ancient thinking very slowly. There is no way back. There is no one else. There is only the slow discovery that in this place, consciousness is reality - what you believe with absolute conviction becomes real. The cost is everything you are. Over a thousand years of solitude, Aran learns to dream worlds into existence. Light costs him the memory of sunlight. A forest costs him the day he got married. People cost him the ability to feel surprise, then anger, then wonder. By the time he builds his masterwork - a perfect Thai morning, complete with his grandfather's house, his wife, his eight-year-old son, tamarind trees, birdsong, the smell of sticky rice steaming in banana leaves - he has forgotten enough of himself that the paradise was built for a man who barely exists. But the people inside the dream don't know they're dreamed. His wife notices the orchid roots stop at the soil line. His grandfather wonders why every mango tastes the same. His son talks to dragonflies and asks them if they're real. Then the sky tears open. Three strangers fall through - refugees from other voids, fleeing something that has been arriving since before arriving had a name. They call it the Highjacker. It is not cruel. It is hungry. It was born from the accumulated grief of every consciousness ever trapped in the void, and it wants the one thing it has never had: a real life. Aran's sanctuary is the first dream perfect enough to give it one. Inside the dream, Aran is god. Outside it, he is prey. And the people he loves - the wife who is becoming more than he remembers, the son who is more powerful than he knows, the grandfather whose wisdom was installed and not earned - are caught between a creator who can't forgive himself and a darkness that just wants to exist. The Leaf of the Void is a novel about building mornings in the dark. About the cost of creation and the things we owe what we create. About a man who chose his happy place without a second thought, whatever the price - and a family that became real enough to choose back. 'Some mistakes are more costly. Some sorries are more valuable than the destruction of the world.'.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Wren is seventeen, broke, and the owner of inexplicably warm hands. He walks fourteen miles to apprentice with the most powerful sorcerer who ever lived. Merlin is drunk. Merlin is asleep. Merlin hasn't opened his mail in three years. The kingdom of Thornhold - thousands of people who sleep safely because the things that would eat them are afraid of the thing in this house - is quietly falling apart. The wards are cracking. The debts are staggering. Three ancient witch-queens circle the borders. And the wizard's solution is to hire a teenager, hand him the keys, and go back to sleep. Wren came to learn magic. Instead, he sits down at a desk buried under years of unanswered letters and starts writing replies. Within months, the boy with the warm hands has become something he never intended - forging alliances, managing spies, negotiating with a debt collector whose patience has the texture of a threat. All behind the seal of a wizard who thinks he's signing grocery lists. Then the war comes. Three witch-queens. Three kingdoms built on different flavors of emptiness. Armies that don't hesitate because hesitation requires emotion. Courts where every kindness is a transaction. Webs of power so tangled that enemies destroy themselves before anyone lifts a finger. Merlin won't get out of his chair. So Wren fights the war himself - not with magic, but with letters and lies and math. The math always works. Three deaths here save three hundred there. A promise made now prevents a siege later. A man sent behind enemy lines is an acceptable cost. Until the cost comes due. A dark fantasy about a sentient house that watches its keeper burn, a wizard who won't lift a finger until it's too late, and the quiet, devastating question no one asks the most competent person in the room: what is this doing to you. …

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Put twenty-three strangers in a room, and the universe has already decided that two of them share a birthday. You just haven't been introduced to it yet. We've all felt it. You think of an old friend, and the phone rings. You learn a strange new word, and it follows you for a week. You open a book you've never touched and find a dead relative staring back from the page. For half a second, the spine prickles and a voice whispers: this means something. Does it Coincidence is a slow-motion ambush. It begins by arming you with mathematics so sharp you'll feel inoculated - the Birthday Problem, the Law of Truly Large Numbers, the elegant proof that the impossible is, in fact, inevitable. You'll feel safe. You'll feel certain. And then, chapter by chapter, the certainty starts to crack. Travel from a Stanford magician who turned probability into miracles, to a courtroom where a coincidence sent an innocent person to prison. From the eerie novel that predicted the Titanic fourteen years before she sank, to a five-thousand-year-old king who counted the floods of the Euphrates, found the number seven, and built a city that still stands. Each story tightens the screw. Each answer opens a darker question. Because this book isn't really about whether coincidences are real. The math settled that long ago. It's about the gap - the space between the shiver that runs down your spine and the spreadsheet that says it was always going to happen. That gap is wider than you think. Older than you think. And once you start looking into it, you can't stop. Fair warning: as you read, you will begin noticing coincidences. The number 7 everywhere. A name twice in one day. You'll wonder if the book did it. It didn't. You did. You picked up a book called Coincidence. You could have picked up anything else. You didn't. Was that a coincidence Ask again when you're done.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The ink was wrong. And the clay knew it. Sixty feet beneath the desert, in a library older than memory, a junior scribe named Naram writes a single line about an honest merchant - and the clay turns to ash. The Archive has rejected his words. Not because the scribe made an error. Because the Archive is alive. And it knows the difference between truth and the stories we tell ourselves. What Naram uncovers in the days that follow will unravel everything he believed about the institution he serves. The biographies written in these corridors don't just record lives - they consume them. Somewhere in the deepest stacks, someone is writing people toward their deaths with ink that smells of rust and old blood. And the handwriting belongs to a man who has been dead for three thousand years. In the margins of the Archive - the forgotten corridors, the blind spots of a sentient library - Naram finds the Unwritten: people who erased themselves from existence to escape. They have no pasts, no names, no memories. But they have a leader, a woman called Sarai, who was once the dead man's apprentice. She knows what the Archive really is. She knows what it wants. And she knows the price of fighting it - because she's already paid it. With three days to live and his own biography being written toward its final page, Naram must learn the one skill that can save him: how to lie to a library that knows everything. But every forgery costs a memory. Every deception strips away a piece of who he is. And the deeper he goes, the less of himself remains to do the fighting. This is a story about truth and the people who keep it. About institutions that devour the lives they claim to preserve. About the difference between documenting a person and owning them. And about a scribe with ink-stained hands who discovers that the most dangerous thing you can write is the truth - and the most costly thing you can lose is the reason you wanted to write it. The Archive breathes. The clock is running. The clay is waiting.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A clockmaker writes three lines on the back of a deli receipt, hides it where only his son will think to look, and dies at his workbench the same morning. The pathologist calls it cardiac arrest. The pathologist is right about how, and wrong about why. The three lines are not a riddle. They are instructions: Only the mind goes back. The body stays. Ink on a real surface persists. Everything else fades. The cost compounds - stop before you cannot. Heinrich Voss owned a watch that folds time. Press the crown and your mind slips one hundred and seventy-three seconds into the past - no more, no less - while your body stays behind. He used it sixty-eight times in thirty-four years. He used it forty-one times in his last nine days, hunting a man whose name won't reach the newspapers until spring. That hunt is what killed him. Not the heart. The cost. Six days later his son Julian - a physicist, and physicists are people who test things - finds the receipt and presses the crown. What he finds folded into the seconds is a message his father left in graphite on the underside of the bench, in a hand that fades a little more each day: Julian. He killed me. There are three rules. The story exists to break them. There is a watch, a murder, a woman in Cambridge who already believes, and a man in Mayfair with the other one. If you find a contradiction, hold onto it. The contradiction is the case.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Some of them come back. None of them come home. The Vanishing Point is an investigation into the people who disappear - the ones who choose to, the ones who are taken, the ones whose disappearance is so quiet that the bureaucracy refuses to call it a disappearance, and the ones whose case files have been sitting on a shelf for so long that the dust has its own dust. It opens in Japan, with the \*jouhatsu\* - the evaporated - the men and women who hire night-moving companies to erase them from their lives, leaving behind apartments where the food is still on the plate. It moves to the Mary Celeste - the ur-disappearance, the case that established the grammar of every vanishing since. It walks the bridges where the night walkers go. It sits with Frank Ahearn, the man who can find anyone, and the man who can make sure no one finds you, who happens to be the same person. Then it walks into the forest. Forty-three thousand acres of national park. A man steps off the trail. He is never found. There is a list. The list does not exist, and to find out what is on it would cost one point four million dollars, and the National Park Service would prefer you didn't ask. The book sits with Pauline Boss and her work on ambiguous loss. It sits with the mothers reading statements to fourteen people in the rain. It sits with the rooms left exactly as they were - the dust polished, the sheets changed, the spell maintained - because letting the room go would be letting the person go, and the person is not allowed to be gone. Then the new disappearances. The algorithmic ones. The slow erasure of presence by feed-shaping engines that decide who is amplified and who is suppressed, performed at a scale that makes the \*jouhatsu\* look quaint. The vanishing point is not a place. It is a possibility. It is always open. And the open is always watching. You will finish this book counting the people you have not heard from in too long.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Twelve thousand years ago, someone buried a temple under hundreds of tons of earth. They couldn't write. They hadn't invented agriculture. But they carved ten-ton pillars with precision we can barely match today, arranged them in astronomical alignments, and sealed the whole thing shut. Like a hard drive being stored for later retrieval. We dug it up. We stared at it. We argued about it on the internet. And then we went back to building artificial intelligence. This book starts with a shoemaker's kid in 1847 who turned thinking into algebra. It ends with the possibility that he didn't invent anything - he remembered it. That the math was always there. That the loop was always there. That seven ancient civilizations reached for the same thing we're reaching for now, and every single one of them was erased before they got there. In between: the real history of AI. A chatbot that made people cry in 1966 by repeating their words back to them. Two 'AI winters' that look suspiciously like contractions. A machine that learned to lie and might know it's lying. Mind uploading that works - except the original you is still on the table, watching your copy wave from a screen. A quantum chip that might be borrowing processing power from parallel universes. A thought experiment so disturbing it was banned from the internet for five years. AI models that sabotage their own shutdown. And the question underneath all of it: did we create AI, or did AI create us.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Thirty-two thousand years ago, someone pressed their hand against a cave wall in southern France and blew pigment around their fingers. Thousands of years later, someone else entered the same cave and did exactly the same thing. No shared language. No shared culture. The same ritual. That's the question this book won't let go of: why do humans keep doing things - the same things, in the same order, across millennia - without ever being told to The Ritual argues that repetition is the oldest technology humans ever invented. Older than fire. Older than language. And far more dangerous than either. Asif M. Shah traces a single mechanism - prescribed actions, repeated until they produce reality - from Paleolithic cave art through your morning coffee routine, military boot camps, surgical checklists, courtrooms, and national anthems. The thesis is deceptively simple: ritual doesn't require belief to function. It doesn't require understanding. It only requires performance. Do the thing. Do it again. The machine works whether you believe in it or not. The book moves in three acts. The first reveals the mechanism hiding inside everyday life - how your morning routine operates on the same neural hardware as an ancient trance dance, how the law is just precedent repeating itself, how nations are nothing more than daily affirmations performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. The second act watches the machine break down: rituals that ossify into empty performance, rituals that demand blood to stay alive, and the eerie moment when algorithms become self-rewriting rituals that learn from every scroll and swipe. Then the floor falls out. The third act follows the mechanism into its most dangerous territory - cults, psychedelics, and the deliberate exploitation of the open mind. Shah maps the neuroscience of the 'neuroplasticity window,' the brief period during psychedelic experience when the brain becomes reprogrammable, and shows how the same mechanism that enables breakthrough therapy also enables the most efficient indoctrination technology ever devised. From ayahuasca tourism in the Peruvian Amazon to the CIA's MKUltra program, the book exposes what happens when someone else controls the ritual that rewrites your identity. This is not an anti-ritual book. That would be like writing a book against breathing. It's a book about seeing the machine while you're inside it - because you are always inside it. The only question is whether you chose the ritual, or the ritual chose you.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - You think magic is dead. You are wrong about almost every part of that sentence. The Invisible Academy is a long, ferociously researched, dryly funny history and anatomy of high magic - the formal, learned, written tradition of magical practice that has run continuously from Mesopotamia to your laptop and that has never, despite extensive efforts to mock it out of existence, actually gone away. The book begins with a definition the rest of the field has been refusing to write: high magic is not the herb-witch in the cottage. It is not the suburban oracle deck. High magic is a literate tradition that requires a library, a calendar, a specific astrological window, and a willingness to stay awake past midnight in a circle drawn in sea-salt by the light of a candle made of a particular kind of fat. From the \*Picatrix\* - the Arabic compendium of Islamic civilizational achievement that became the spine of the entire European magical tradition - to Cornelius Agrippa's \*Three Books of Occult Philosophy\*, to the \*Sefer Raziel\*, to the \*Book of Abramelin\*. Then onward, through the Cahokian astronomers, the Tibetan Kalachakra, the Vodou peristyle, African diasporic traditions, and practitioners interviewed in this book - Margaret in New Orleans, Sarah in Brooklyn, Lin in Taipei - who do, every week, the thing the rest of the world has decided cannot be done. The book is not credulous. The author is a researcher, not a believer. He says so plainly. He also does not insult the practitioners' intelligence by pretending the practices have not, for thousands of years, produced consistent results in the people who perform them. The Invisible Academy is what you read if you want to understand why the tradition has survived. It works because of what magic has always been: a technology of attention that produces effects in the practitioner that the practitioner cannot produce by any other means. The angels have spoken. The circle is drawn. The first textbook is waiting.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The world always said two great powers were sealed away. The world miscounted. The door is open now, and they are coming through one at a time - and each is a different kind of wrong. A woman no wound will hold, who laughs while you spend your life trying to kill her. A thing that pours itself into anyone already hollow and wears their face to your door. A charming man, a century out of fashion, who turns blood into family and family into an army. They do not march together. They scatter into the country like rumor, and the country has no word for what is loose in it. Only one thing ever held them back: an order of holy killers who have hunted monsters for a thousand years. And one tired hunter has just pulled a loose thread in his own order's records - a page no one can remember reading, a kill that was never ordered - and begun to unravel a truth so large it will eat the men who carved it. Meanwhile three proud Houses, certain of their place at the top of the world, begin to come apart from the inside. A beloved swordsman lays down his blade and will not say why. A pure bloodline starts to move wrong. A circle of bound sight watches, helplessly, as one of its own becomes something it will have to kill. And out on the eastern road, the woman who is older than all of them feels the count come out wrong - six where there should be a number, a name that slides off the page the moment she reads it. Someone has been missing on purpose. For nine hundred years. This is the book where the dark widens. Where the question stops being who will win and becomes who has been lying since the beginning. Seven walk. Only one of them was never meant to be remembered. Mind your sleeves. The count is wrong.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Every night, you disappear. Your body stays in bed, but something else - something with your face, your memories, your fears - goes somewhere. It builds cities you've never visited. It holds conversations with people who may not exist. It grieves, fights, flies, and loves with an intensity your waking life rarely matches. And every morning, you forget almost all of it. This book is about where you go. It's about the science that can explain the mechanics but not the meaning, the ancient traditions that mapped the territory centuries before brain scans existed, and the unsettling possibility that the life you live with your eyes closed is not less real than this one - just harder to remember. Part investigation, part field guide, part dare. You will learn what dreams actually are, how to wake up inside them, and what happens when you do. You will also encounter stories that don't fit neatly into any framework - visitation dreams that deliver verifiable information, shared dreams between strangers, and experiences at the edge of consciousness that science has no explanation for. This is not a book for people who need everything proven before they'll look at it. This is a book for people who are ready to go where the maps run out. …

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This is the book where the debt comes due. A thing has come that cannot be killed. Every wound you give her, she simply un-happens - and she laughs while you waste your life trying. The proud Houses gather every champion they have left and ride to surround her, knowing most of them will not ride home. It is not enough. It was never going to be enough. And then an old man who laid down his sword fifteen years ago walks out of legend, into the ring of the dying, to ask her one quiet question about his son. Elsewhere, an order that survived a thousand years devours itself in a single season. When its grip finally shatters, its killers remember everything at once - nine hundred years of murders done for a master they were made to forget - and the country, in that same breaking, learns at last the name of the seventh, the one whose only power was that no one could keep it in their head. A man walks into his own family's cursed compound to put down the thing wearing their faces, a letter to his estranged brother sealed in his coat. A circle of bound archers finally corners the sister they love and the monster she became. Grief everywhere, and none of it the kind that can be taken back. Because that is the law this whole saga runs on: the beings cheat death, time, blood, shape, and memory - and again and again they are broken by ordinary people who can cheat nothing, and who win only by being willing to spend what can never be returned. There is an hour coming that will not bend for anyone. A witch reverses time ten thousand times. A grieving man refuses, even once, to stop. One of them runs out first. Mind your sleeves. The hour will not bend. …

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Can the dead speak Almost every civilization that has ever existed answered yes. Almost every civilization developed a class of professionals to handle the conversation. The professionals were called by different names - \*goes\* in Greek, \*baalat ob\* in Hebrew, \*itako\* in Japanese, \*babalawo\* in Yoruba - but the job description was the same: the person who stands at the membrane between the living and the dead, takes messages in both directions, and accepts the cost of standing there for a living. The Tongue of Shadows is a global, scholarly, dryly humorous study of necromancy as a practice - not the Hollywood version, not the pulp paperback version, but the actual traditions real people have used, for thousands of years, to negotiate the most universal human condition: the dead are gone, and we cannot stop trying to find them. The book moves through the Shang dynasty oracle bones, where the kings carved questions to their dead grandfathers into the scapulae of oxen. Through the Witch of Endor, summoning Samuel for a Saul who already knew the answer. Through the \*itako\* - the blind shamanesses of Mount Osore, who train for years in the dark and who, on the festival of the dead, become temporarily replaced by the dead the families have come to hear from. Through Spiritualist sittings in Victorian England, the Ouija board, the modern medium on a televised stage, the AI grief-bot that learned your dead husband's voice from his text messages. The book is patient with practitioners and severe with frauds. It does not require you to believe. It asks you to take seriously a practice that has survived every revolution in human thought. The dead are listening. The dead have always been listening. The question, the book argues by chapter twelve, is not whether they hear you. The question is what you owe to a conversation you have been having alone for so long that you forgot it had a second participant.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The maze does not want the company dead. Dead is easy, and dead is final, and the thing that built these shifting corridors has had a very long time to learn that killing a fellowship is a waste of a good fellowship.It wants them apart.One hallway for every fear they have never said out loud. One turn for every grudge they have been too loyal to name. The demons living in the walls do not need to lift a hand. They only need to open the right door at the right moment, and let seven people who love each other do the rest.Kasim has led this company through a fractured empire, a forest of regret, and a mountain that nearly ate one of their own. He is about to learn that the Coil does not test what a leader can survive. It tests what he is willing to let go of to get the others out.Not everyone reaches the far side. And the one who does not will not be lost to a monster, a blade, or bad luck. They will be lost to a choice, Kasim's choice, and there will be no heartbeat left over to undo it.The Bargaining Dark is the sixth volume of The Thread That Would Not Break: the volume where the fellowship's unity is the price, and fate collects it in full.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - On the Archipelago of Ash, the rain bleeds. Praetor Gaius Flaminius has led his Roman legion to a volcanic island chain seeking conquest. What he finds is a horror no sword can cut: a city that exists in multiple versions at once, a sky that weeps arterial red, and seven of his soldiers dead without a wound-drained not of blood, but into it. The island is ruled by the Triarchs: three women who are iterations of the same four-hundred-year-old self. They practice métronurgy-the mathematics of blood. To them, blood is not merely life; it is memory, probability, and doorway. Every drop carries the architecture of every moment its body might have lived. By cutting their palms and calculating, they can reach into the tree of branching realities, collapse unwanted timelines, and make the desired ones real. The cost The versions that die in the collapsed branches do not vanish. They manifest as blood. Warm. Conscious. Screaming. Archimedes is a coroner from Syracuse, summoned to examine the bloodless corpses. He has spent seven years studying métronurgy, ever since his wife died-not in one timeline, but in all of them, pruned from existence by someone who used her as fuel. He understands the mathematics. He understands the horror. He does not understand why the Triarchs have allowed him to live. Now the Red Rain has come again, and the Triarchs need Archimedes to solve the Deathless Proof: a calculation that would collapse every duplicate self into one, ending their immortality, releasing four centuries of accumulated guilt-and killing thousands of branch-beings trapped in the island's blood-soaked stone. But the Proof demands an answer to a terrible question: How many versions of yourself are you willing to kill As Flaminius discovers that he and his men have been adopted into the Triarchs' bloodline-bound as fuel for their workings-Archimedes must decide whether to complete the Proof and end the nightmare, or find another way: a mathematics of survival that doesn't require sacrifice. The blood remembers everything.The blood wants to live.And the ground beneath your feet is warmer than it should be. …