A world strangely similar to Earth. In many ways it’s like ours, but it’s sharply different in a few contrasting features. For example, magic rules there and slavery exists—you can end up in it even as a child, but earning freedom is incredibly difficult. Vyacheslav Strelkov, a slave and the son of a slave woman, who has a mutilated, sealed inside him Gift of an elementalist, desperately wants freedom: for himself and for his younger sister too—also a slave from childhood. But to get it, the boy will have to go through something… so much so that at sixteen he could turn gray in an instant…