Orphan: The Key to Magic I

Mar was a thief. Not a cutpurse – or, at least, not often – but a true outlaw denizen of the rooftops. He stole from the rich, and sometimes from the not so rich, and, if truth were to be told, even from the poor if he was hungry enough. He had grown up on the streets of Khalar, the last city of the Glorious Empire of the North, and thievery was simply the life that he had been dealt. He took considerable pride in the fact that he was a good thief -- he still had his head. But when an ill-advised theft went horribly wrong and the whole city rose up to crucify him, he had no choice but to flee into the Great Waste with an insane scrapper. There he spent his days, baking in the merciless sun as he dug for bits of metal in an ancient sundered city. And then he found a door. And, being a thief, he unlocked it. Orphan is an epic fantasy novel of 99,180 words.