In Vadred, ancient machines sleep beneath the kingdoms, serpents weave patterns in the waves, and a young Reader begins to see the hidden order of the world.
Two sisters will change the world of Vadred. One taken as a young child by slavers, the same day her mother was killed and her sister was born. One grew up knowing, the other did not. Their paths cross, more than once, before either knows who the other is.
Vadred has nine lands and a warning it no longer trusts. The empire that came as the Tenth Land sits now in its temples, its courts and its ledgers — and the lands are discovering they can prosper by handing each other over.
A Reader is carried north toward Sendya, a capital where every faith has a price and every alliance is a wager. An heir watches his own father sell a holy city stone by stone, and is the only man who will say so. An engineer arrives in the empire’s service and finds a world that answers him back. A ruined widow is offered a fortune by a merchant who knows exactly who she used to be.
They begin as strangers, but all four are already inside the same machine.
For readers of N.K. Jemisin, R.F. Kuang, Arkady Martine, and Robert Jackson Bennett — complex and beautiful, always one step from ruin. Come for the wonder, stay for the risk.
The Radore: Book One of The Tenth Land, is complete and releases fourth quarter 2026. Book Two, Future Past, delivers first quarter 2027. Books Three and Four are in final drafts.
Scenes from The Radore →Vadred is a world of nine lands, warned by prophecy that a tenth would destroy it — and the Tenth Land has come, turned the warning into a welcome, and called the forgery scripture. Four lives. Four sides of the same occupation. One world that will not come through unchanged.
A watcher on a fallen fortress, keeping her people alive one tide at a time. On First Eve she loses everything she protects, when she is taken as a living weapon that leaves no tear behind.
Trafficked as a child, she grew into a woman who always makes the deal. When her fortunes wane, a visitor arrives with fabled trade from Vadred’s past — a gift that can never be returned.
His father built him with indulgence, his mother with iron — in spite of that, he has grown into a man with a conscience of his own. When his father hands sacred ground to the Shaimin, he finally has to choose a side.
He arrived as the empire’s instrument — one bag, one title, and a faith he did not question. Top of his class, and still sent to the end of the line — the price of a word repeated, and a woman who vanished in its wake.
The Tenth Land · The Counting Verse
Enter the Vaults of Vadred →
The Gazetteer · The Glossary · Dramatis Personae
Much of this world’s history was rewritten by the people who conquered it — so the deeper you look, you may find more than one version of the same event. That’s not a flaw in the record. It’s the story.
Piar Russo writes literary science fantasy — cinematically staged, psychologically complex, and built on the belief that a world worth entering is a world worth getting lost in.
The Tenth Land is a series set on Vadred, a world where an empire’s arrival has already rewritten a thousand years of history — and two sisters are about to rewrite it again.
The Radore: Book One of The Tenth Land, is complete and releases fourth quarter 2026. Book Two, Future Past, delivers first quarter 2027. Books Three and Four are in final drafts.
Piar lives on a ranch outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband Nick, two horses, and two Bengal cats.
Notes on craft, world, and the choices behind the books
A recurring dream of a great wave, a real flood in Nepal, and the vision that became The Tenth Land — where the story actually began.
Read the dispatch →A nursery rhyme every child on Vadred knows by heart — and, underneath it, a warning that got rewritten into a welcome by the people who conquered it.
Read the dispatch →The map of Vadred came last, not first — every coastline and river follows from a history and a politics I already knew before I drew the line.
Read the dispatch →Some of my favorite pages in any novel are the ones where the story simply stops to look at something. The Tenth Land has rooms like that on purpose.
Read the dispatch →Two sisters, separated at birth, rise on opposite sides of the same occupation and cross paths without knowing it. Four plus points of view, instead of two, is what makes that gap work.
Read the dispatch →Everything here is for my readers, including Keeper — the writing app I use every day. The Reader’s List is where I send the release date for The Radore before anyone else hears it, and news as the series moves.
