The Jewels of Aptor

The world is still healing from the Great Fire, a catastrophe that broke everything. On the docks of Leptor, Geo, a wandering poet, and Urson, a giant handy with sails, meet Snake: a four-armed street thief who reads minds. The enigmatic Priestess of Argo, the White Goddess, commands them to voyage to the island of Aptor and steal a jewel from the dark god Hama. With it, she claims, she can defeat the malign forces gathering against her land. But the journey deepens into something stranger than a simple errand. Aptor is a place where reality softens, where the boundaries between self and other blur under Snake's telepathic gaze, and where the group's assumptions about their mission, and about Argo herself, begin to crack. She already possesses two jewels. What happens when power becomes absolute? This is Delany at twenty-three, already questioning the stories heroes tell themselves about their quests.