The Death Gate Universe

Long ago, in terror of what their rivals might do, the demigods called Sartan took a whole world and broke it — sundering one planet into four, each raised upon a single element, and chaining their enemies the Patryn inside a living prison called the Labyrinth. Air, Fire, Stone, Water: four sealed realms, joined only by the Death Gate, a passage no one now living remembers how to walk. The Death Gate Cycle is the story of what those realms became after their makers vanished and left them to rot. Across seven books, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman — the architects of Dragonlance — send one man through the Gate to map the ruin: Haplo, a Patryn agent, his skin inked with rune-magic, a strange dog at his heel, and a lord in the shadows who means to conquer everything he finds. Each realm opens a book: floating isles and a vast god-machine on Arianus (Dragon Wing); an endless sunlit jungle on Pryan (Elven Star); a dead world of molten seas and walking corpses on Abarrach (Fire Sea); a drowned deep on Chelestra (Serpent Mage) — before the final three volumes turn from scouting to reckoning. What sets it apart is architecture. This is one tightly-engineered arc in which elves, dwarves, and humans are the pieces on a board two elder races have played since the world cracked — theology, engineering, and grief braided into high adventure and leavened by the half-mad wizard Zifnab. Read it in publication order, one through seven; begin with Dragon Wing and step through the Gate.