A twenty-year drought grips the city of Uruk and Nerguiin, the gala priestess in charge of speaking to Anu, the god of the wind, hears only silence.

Then a bard, a ruthless thief, and their enigmatic leader break into her chambers atop the White Temple with a crazy plan in mind. Nerguiin strikes a deal with them and abandons the comforts of temple life to join them in the greatest heist of their age: stealing rain from Ereshkigal, the Goddess of Death.

And now, a mysterious Bronze Warrior hunts them across Sumer, and Nerguiin begins to suspect that their charismatic leader is far more than she lets on. Yet, the world still suffers, and Nerguiin and her companions prepare to breach the Underworld to set things right.

The gods, though, have other ideas.

Maps and artwork

Map and artwork © 2025 by Farstrider Oy is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Maps were created by Jesse Kaukonen. Illustrations and cover were created by Joel Laakkonen.

Illustration of the city of Uruk and the ziggurat.

Map of the 6th and 7th rings of the Golden City.

Map of Sumer in 3000 BCE, in the Jemdet Nasr period, no doubt contains historical inaccuracies. One of the challenges was deciding which cities & towns to add, as many maps made of Sumer often focus on the Ur period, almost 1000 years later. What I found particularly interesting was the location of the Persian Gulf, which in this time was almost 200 kilometers further inland. Go look at Google Earth and search for the Great Ziggurat of Ur - it's so far from the coast now!

A challenge with this map was deciding how to represent a city the size of modern Tokyo. Ultimately I settled for abstracting everything to just the circles, as it was obvious trying to detail anything at this scale was doomed to failure on low resolution eink devices.

One of the fun puzzles that made me create a city of such design began with a mathematical puzzle: how does one calculate the total circumference of seven nested circles? Originally, I used an Archimedes spiral, but decided to go for rings as the gates made little sense in a spiral. And it just wasn't very practical if one wanted to walk from the 1st gate to the 7th in minimum time. In the earliest outlines of the story the thieves climbed over the walls due to the spiral design. If you're the mathy type, here's my solution.

Please don't hurt your neck with this one.

High resolution cover art without text.

Music

Sheet music for Lament for Inanna's Passing composed by Dillan Schmitz from King Aurorus Music