Mark of Fire

An ancient prophecy. A young woman’s destiny.

Lorness Carol, coming of age in the kingdom of her warlord father, Lord Rafel, aspires to wield magic. But she’s also unknowingly become the obsession of Kragan, an avenging wielder as old as evil itself. He’s waited centuries to find and kill the female prophesied as the only human empowered to destroy him. However, dispatching the king’s assassin, Blade, to Rafel’s Keep, ends in treason. For Blade arrives not with a weapon but rather a warning for the woman he’s known and loved since he was a child. With a price on his head, Blade flees—as Carol and her family are urged away on their own desperate route of escape.

Now, traversing the lawless western borderlands, Carol struggles to understand the uncanny magic she possesses and must learn to master. Though separated, Carol and Blade are still united—not only by the darkness pursuing them both but by a quest toward destiny, revenge, and the revelations of an ancient prophecy that signal the ultimate war between good and evil.

Richard Phillips was born in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1956. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1979 and qualified as an Army Ranger, going on to serve as an officer in the US Army. He earned a master’s degree in physics from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1989, completing his thesis work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. After working as a research associate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he returned to the army to complete his tour of duty. Today he lives with his wife, Carol, in Phoenix, where he writes science fiction thrillers—including The Rho Agenda series (The Second Ship, Immune, and Wormhole), The Rho Agenda Inception series (Once Dead, Dead Wrong, and Dead Shift), and The Rho Agenda Assimilation series (The Kasari Nexus, The Altreian Enigma, and The Meridian Ascent)—and the epic Endarian Prophecy fantasy novels.