From the introduction:
This is Iron Age fantasy, beautiful and harsh: spears and mail, monsters, fury, bodies, smoke, spells, and blood. Life is too often described by force, brutal extraction, ignorance, torture, despair, resignation, and inscription upon the body. This is the Crescent Land, caught between the blinding purity of Amboriyon’s cloud citadels with their smiling envoys and the stained wastes of Rbaja with their stinking pestholes of undead. There's no historical happy ending, no Renaissance, no ancient classics, no cradle of literacy, and no end in sight.
Imagine with me, a place: the mountains fall away before you, each ridge lower, fading into the lowlands, themselves stretching across a patchwork of scrub, dense forest, and farms. Above it all, its horizon seemingly straight across from you, so it forms a vertical wall filling the lower half of the sky, rises the sea.
Your companion’s face is lined and his eyes hooded before their time – he should be tilling land somewhere with his family, speaking for his clan at the moot about herds and water. No less so the broad-bodied woman whose emblem recalls some gentry family lost in fire, with her sword of actual steel and the scar of a francisca strike through her face. As well, too, the older man who keeps his bloated, ebon eye covered by a leather patch. Like theirs, your home is the Circle: at your left hand, the nails emit faint light, and at the right, the flesh is mottled black beneath the skin.
You can see the river’s nearer curves winding toward the shore. You know only enough to bring you here – to defy both warring powers, for your uncertain sense of purpose, for the haunted drives that jolt your sleep, or to find the only peace you know in the sudden need to kill. Some of you think of the good you may do. Others envy that hope.
You are the Circle. Are you heroes? This world does not know that word. Maybe, just maybe, it will.