I Read Stories: When Your Being Here Is Gentler Than Your Absence Hard by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko

When Your Being Here is Gentler Than Your Absence Hard by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Quin saves Fallon Deere, the First Minister, from assassins. The Free States are being attacked by Tierrans, who have perfected a new magic, that of entropy, creating waves of intense heat and cold. Or rather they will, because both Quin and the assassin have been sent back via temporal magic.

Deere’s not like the other politicians, which is one reason she becomes leader of the Free States in the war. That and her knowledge of magic, including the fraught temporal magic that puts them in this position. But that’s not why Quin is willing to take the chance of death far from her own time, though that’s why Deere must be saved, because she watches and listens and sometimes laughs, and then she makes the right decision. Because she listens to the platitudes of sacrifice and service and glory and she condemns them. The war is survival, there is no glory to death.

Deere does not believe that temporal magic can change the past, but the Tierrans do and the future cannot take that chance. So Quin has secrets to keep, and secrets to learn.

Read This: Action, romance, time travel, unique magic, world-building that clarifies and hints at more, it’s got all of it
Don’t Read This: Time travel AND magic? In this economy?