It starts in Tangier, in a shop nobody pays attention to.
Omar and Ali, Moroccan-American teen brothers from New Jersey, wander in during a family vacation. On a back shelf they find a strange triangular object. A curiosity. They pay the shopkeeper and take it home to the States. It sits on a shelf in New Jersey for a while, doing nothing.
Then, one day, the brothers accidentally set it off.
The crystal flares. The portal opens. Earth disappears. Orulenthia begins.
Orulenthia is a giant planet. Megacities of billions. A red giant sun burns over a civilization that spans continents the brothers can't map. And the whole thing lives under the iron grip of Lord Thaarn, a tyrant who rose to power through fear and keeps it by enjoying every cruelty required to hold it. He tortures. He rules by terror. Lord Thaarn's spies are in every street, every crowd, every city on the planet.
What those spies are hunting is a rebellion. A network of alien rebels across Orulenthia who refuse to go quiet, including the warrior-scholar Vaan, the fierce warrior Nysha, and Vaan's closest friend and most trusted ally Ytelthuun. Vaan is one of the main rebels, a voice that speaks up against Thaarn when silence would be safer, and that has put him high on the tyrant's list.
Omar and Ali step out of the portal straight into the middle of that war. They don't know the planet. They don't know the players. Before they've figured out which way is up, the rebellion is pulling them into hiding. What follows is motion. Prison breaks. Chases through megacity streets. Hovering telepathic vehicles skimming just above the ground, weaving between marketplaces and crowds. Giant gliders launching at extreme speed on non-human propulsion, tearing vertically into a crimson sky. Winged sentient beasts that look like giant stingrays carrying riders between continents. Alien deserts. Floating mountains. Strange cities built by minds that don't think like human ones.
And somewhere inside all of it, the truth about the triangular device they carried through. What it is, why it activated, why it chose them.
An action-packed young adult sci-fi fantasy built for readers who want real momentum, a planet large enough to lose yourself in, and a sibling story that holds its ground against the alien spectacle. One of the rare young adult sci-fi adventures to put Muslim heroes at the center of the story, representation still far too absent from the genre.
