In the last days of the world, the energies of man and nature mingle, giving birth to Linkers – people with the power to control the elements. Kurt Ciardi, an electrician and first among the chosen, is determined to use his command over lightning to stop the apocalypse. Eric Jaeder, a college student with the ability to reshape empty space, sees the coming destruction as an opportunity to start fresh. The fate of all that exists rests on who will trace the world’s decay to its source, following clues left by ancient tribes to the shores of a lost island kingdom. But will the truth save humanity, or condemn it?
You can buy this book on Amazon. The Broken Lightning books can be read in any order, but chronologically, this one comes first. It began life as a half-formed idea and a one-eighth-formed draft of a story when I was in high school, but I had a hard time making it feel different enough from Children of Woodvale then, so I shelved it until I ended up as an Asian Studies major in college, when Taoist philosophy and 15th century Chinese ghost stories drew my thinking in a fresher direction. I completed the first version of Qi Symbol in 2006 as my senior project, and I shopped it around to agents for a while in 2010-2012, thinking I’d let it be the one manuscript I sold to a publishing house to make my name as an author. I imagined a tide of notoriety lifting my other books without me having to give up editorial control over more than just the one. However, I quickly realized that I just didn’t find the traditional publishing channels as fun as making my own proofs, plus I unexpectedly started working on a sequel I felt much less inclined to sell, so, after one more editing pass, I released Qi Symbol independently in 2013.
This book has one of the only covers not designed by me: it’s actually a photo of a gorgeous copper plate etching made by artist Christopher Curry John O’Connell, AKA Kit Curry (who is my friend, but I hired him properly for the job of creating this supremely inventive cover art, which he conceived with minimal input outside of access to the story–pay your artists, folks!) He’d go on to do another photographed-physical-art cover for the second Broken Lightning book as well.