THE WANDERING MOUNTAINS: A Novel of Erdara, Book Two: 2

Durin Ironbane has never been particularly good at leaving well enough alone.A brilliant dwarven artificer with an unfortunate habit of asking whether perfectly functional things could work better, Durin has spent his life challenging traditions that have endured for thousands of years. Most dwarves consider him a genius. Many also consider him an enormous nuisance.Then one experiment destroys Foundry Seven.Thrown into an unknown tunnel beneath the mountains, Durin encounters Doctor Terra Gaius, an engineer from a civilization the dwarves never knew existed. With no shared language, the two begin communicating through the one thing they both understand: engineering.What follows carries Durin farther than any dwarf could have imagined.Advanced medicine. Artificial intelligence. Machines that fly. Trains that race beneath cities. Mines on the Moon. Mountains drifting through the darkness between worlds.Along the way, Durin helps create Veyr, a new artificial person born from the unlikely union of dwarven magic and Technocracy computation, and discovers that the principles his people have used to shape stone for forty thousand years may have applications far beyond Erdara.But the greatest discovery is not technological.For the first time, the dwarves are offered something that could transform their civilization without requiring them to abandon what came before: access to the Wandering Mountains, vast asteroids rich with resources and untouched by the cities, graves, bridges, and history buried within the mountains of home.The Wandering Mountains, Book Two of the Erdara series, is a science-fantasy adventure about curiosity, tradition, artificial intelligence, cultural contact, and the strange consequences of asking one dangerous question: If something already works, why not see if it can work better?