Six teens. Six continents. One crumbling world.
A prophecy begins to stir across the globe as strange visions, impossible creatures, and terrifying powers start to surface. In Berlin, the paths of six strangers collide... not by chance, but by design. Someone has been pulling the threads for longer than they’ve been alive.
Ancient seals are weakening. Old powers are rising. And in the shadows, something older than myth waits for its moment.
They’re not heroes. Not yet.
But the world is running out of time.
Six teens. Six continents. One crumbling world.
A prophecy begins to stir across the globe as strange visions, impossible creatures, and terrifying powers start to surface. In Berlin, the paths of six strangers collide... not by chance, but by design. Someone has been pulling the threads for longer than they’ve been alive.
Ancient seals are weakening. Old powers are rising. And in the shadows, something older than myth waits for its moment.
They’re not heroes. Not yet.
But the world is running out of time.
Nia ✦ Afternoon (March 26) ✦ Botswana
I’m falling before I can even process what is happening. My hands hit the ground and it takes a moment to register that I’ve slammed my palms into dirt.
“Joo…” I gasp, the word stuck in my throat. “What… what is this?”
The world spins, and when I open my eyes I see nothing but stone.
Big stones. Leaning, jagged and glowing before they blink out of existence, flickering in and out of being. The dirt under my bare feet shimmers like it can’t quite decide whether to be solid or liquid.
My stomach drops. I back up a step and the earth disappears. My heel hangs in midair, the dirt around it sucked out of existence. I throw my arms out to prevent myself from toppling over, but my hands no longer touch the dirt of Botswana’s dry heat. It is soft and spongy, sucking at my fingers.
Fog coils around me, thick and heavy. The world feels wrong in its silence. I can’t hear birds, or a breeze. There is a low vibration, like something humming in the air, like a giant grinding its teeth.
Silver to my left. A flash of a girl kneeling in the dirt, blood on her hands and her eyes blown wide with horror. I blink and she is gone.
Crash to my right. Two people in armor, swords raised, rending the mist as if it were smoke. Sparks fly. Shouts burn through the air, but there is no sound. One of them falls, and the mist swallows him before I can discern who he is.
Images stab through the vapor in quick, choking bursts. A broad-shouldered boy with something great casting a shadow across him. A bright, flickering girl whose hands shape the light itself. A boy with eyes so silver they are like a knife. A golden gaze that slices through the mist and disappears. A warm-faced boy lit by shifting green as the air around him folds and spills into corridors I cannot follow. Faces that disappear before I can focus on any one of them.
The sky rips. Blue and white tear the world in two like a wound. Gold spills through the split as if something on the other side is clawing to get here.
Then she is here.
She doesn’t walk. She glides. A shape that sometimes coheres, sometimes fades to ash. Her cloak rends the mist; one moment solid cloth, the next shredded smoke. Her face flickers, shadowed by the mist and then crystal clear… marked by the light.
I stumble backward. My heart is drumming in my chest. My heel smacks a rock and I nearly fall. The wet dirt beneath my palms is sticky. It feels real. It feels wrong.
She kneels. One hand presses into a standing stone and the rock devours her fingers like clay. Images ripple across it, silver and blue and gold and then snap away until nothing remains.
Slowly she turns her head to face me.
The fog around her billows, a wave about to swallow stones, struggling, even the rend in the sky. Her eyes pierce through it all. Golden and bottomless. They do not flicker.
I can’t breathe.
She saw me!
Mist curls at my feet like reaching fingers. Instinct outruns thought and I scramble backward. My feet are tangled, hands clawing at the slick earth.
“Wait!” I rasp. My voice cracks. “Who…?”
“Beware….”
The word is not spoken. It is a burn inside my skull, as loud as a drum and as soft as a whisper at the same time.
The mist lunges at me, hungry. I keep scraping away but the ground beneath me slips and the mist swallows me. I fall into nothing.
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
Heat hits me and the world comes rushing back.
The baobab’s roots shove into my back. Dirt is packed under my fingernails. I’m on my knees, my breath coming in gasps as my heart beats a fist in my throat.
She saw me. She was there!
I’ve had visions. Flashes of the past. Visions of what might be to come. But this: never have I felt the pull of the other side like this, like they reached back.
The letter is still folded in my pocket. Berlin. Professor Mara. The internship. I am to board a plane in three days and leave this earth that smells of smoke and stew and warm skin.
Everyone is telling me I should go. Mom has cried happy tears when the acceptance came. Dad has smiled as if he’s already placed a doctorate on my shelf. The elders have given their blessing. “Go,” they say. “The ancestors will walk with you.”
Then why does it still feel like betrayal to leave?
I press my forehead to my palms and try to breathe with the earth beneath me. Try to still the aftershocks the vision sent through me. It does not fade. The aftertaste of gold and cold and warning lingers like metal on my tongue.
The clack of a wooden spoon and smell of cooking smoke pull me back. Mogolo is at the fire.
The dirt path to the homestead is silent as I approach. The sun spreads orange across thatched-roof huts and the herb patch at the fence. Children yell from behind a hut. Smoke curls toward the sky. Everything is the same and nothing is the same.
Grandmother is seated at the fire, stirring. Her face is a tapestry of careful, patient lines. She does not look up when I kneel at her feet.
“You saw her,” she says.
I drop down on the worn mat in front of her. Did she have the same vision? Did she see the same stones?
“She saw you, too,” Mogolo says without pausing.
I pull the letter from my pocket, unfolding and folding it again with fingers that refuse to still. “My flight is in a few days,” I say. “Professor Mara. Berlin.”
She does not blink. “I know, ngwanaka.”
“I want to go,” I whisper. “But it feels like a betrayal. Walking away. Like leaving something unfinished. Like betrayal.”
“You are not betraying us,” she says gently. “You are a weaver of many threads, child. Our past. Our stories. Our future. You are not meant to weave only one tapestry.”
I swallow. “What if I lose the old one while I chase the new?”
Mogolo reaches into her wrap and pulls out a small leather pouch. It is warm where she holds it, like it is a living thing.
“For protection,” she says. “For focus. For remembering.”
I press it to my chest. “You are not afraid?”
“Oh, I am,” she admits, with a wry twitch at the corner of her mouth. “But not of you leaving. I am afraid of the world learning how amazing you are.”
I look up. The sky is a deep purple now. One star pins itself to the baobab.
“I think something is coming,” I say.
She nods. “It always does.”
This book is exceptional. That must be said about Mohs's debut novel. For an author to produce such a compelling story line and weave together such a strong plot structure for the first time, that is a feat only few can accomplish.
From the prologue the reader is thrown in the middle of a world torn between two realms. One is dark and magical, sinister even, and the other is ours. Perfectly normal, perfectly historical, nothing out of the ordinary. All it takes is a few ancient beings to start toying at the seams to bring out the magic in six teenagers who aren't even aware of the power they hold. From the jump, the reader is immersed. From the first chapter, it feels like a five star read.
Seth Mohs's prose sucks the reader in like no other. Each sentence is carefully articulated to visualize and imagine exactly what is written on the page. From the first introduction of each character the reader immediately likes them and enjoys following them around. The audience can feel what the characters are feeling due to the vivid and imaginative descriptions. Every page has action and adventure so unique to this story that it is a refresher of a novel. Echoes of the Lost World is reminiscent of the Percy Jackson series with its personable characters and intense monsters.
There is simply nothing about this book that isn't top tier. The writing is exceptional, the plot structure is well done, each chapter has the perfect amount of character development and action, and the way the story line itself weaves together is fun and entertaining. It is an honor to read a book as great as this one, and since it is projected to be a seven part series, there is plenty to go around!
Echoes of the Lost World is a novel that YA readers will devour, even older readers as well. This was a truly fantastic book and readers everywhere will eagerly anticipate the next installments to come!