Time Master

Between Order and Chaos there is no war of good against evil — only a balance, and a world that lives or dies by how finely it is kept. Seven Lords of Order and seven of Chaos hold the poles of creation; between them stand the mortal adepts of the Circle, who work their magic from a black castle at the tip of a storm-lashed northern peninsula, and who have forgotten that a balance leaning too far toward Order is its own kind of ruin. Louise Cooper's world of the Circle is high fantasy of gods and oaths, of soul-stones and summoned storms, where the most dangerous thing a young adept can discover is what he truly is. The sequence runs across four linked trilogies, all Cooper's own. The Time Master books — The Initiate, The Outcast, The Master — follow Tarod, an adept of the Castle whose gift binds him nearer to Chaos than any oath should allow. Chaos Gate returns to the Circle a generation on, when a hard-won balance is tested afresh. Star Shadow reaches back to an earlier age of the same world, before Order held the ascendant; and the later Daughter of Storms sequence, following the young sensitive Shar Tillmer, carries the mythology into a quieter, more human key for younger readers. What lingers is the moral shape of it: no side wholly right, gods as perilous as they are needful, and heroes made to choose balance over the certainties they were raised on. Begin with The Initiate — the Castle, Tarod, and the whole vast quarrel of Order and Chaos open from its first page.