The Great Houses:
Immovable. Implacable. Unchanging. Old enough to pass themselves off as immortal, arrogant enough to claim ultimate authority over the Spiral Politic.

The Enemy:
Not so much an army as a hostile new kind of history. So ambitious it can re-write worlds, so complex that even calling it by its name seems to underestimate it.

Faction Paradox:
Renegades, ritualiists, saboteurs and subterfugers, the criminal-cult to end all criminal-cults, happy to be caught in the crossfire and ready to take whatever's needed from the wreckage... assuming the other powers leave behind a universe that's habitable.

The War:
A fifty-year-old dispute over the two most valuable territories in existence: "cause" and "effect".

Marking the first five decades of the conflict, The Book of the War is an A to Z of a self-contained continuum and a complete guide to the Spiral Politic, from the beginning of recordable time to the fall of humanity. Part story, part history and part puzzle-box, this is a chronicle of protocol and paranoia in a War where the historians win as many battles as the soldiers and the greatest victory of all is to hold on to your own past…

There is a world where wishes can come true.  Where any simpleton can become a king and any scullery maid might be a princess in disguise.  Kindness and virtue  are rewarded, and the wicked are made to dance in red-hot shoes until they die.  But a witches oven will cook both the virtuous and the wicked alike, and many a frog-prince is crushed beneath the wheels of a cart before he gets that magic kiss.

This world has its own rules and it doesn't care that a certain Doctor Know-All and his friends don't know them.

Now other outsiders have come to the world - traders from the stars seeking the treasures that fell from the rip in the sky.  There are riddles to be solved, contests to win, flax to spin.  The world to survive.

But the World of Wishes is itself in danger from a race of beings with only one wish.  And there is a Princess asleep, and a beast awake - and Giants.