The Death Gate Cycle is a seven part series of fantasy novels by Margeret Weis and Tracy Hickman. The story follows the conflict between two very powerful races, the Sartan and the Patryns. These two races are branches of hunmans, changed following a nuclear holocaust. Hundreds of years before the events of the novels, the Sartans attempted to end the conflict between the two races by sundering the world into four elemental realms and then creating a fifth as a prison for the Patryn, called the Labyrinth.
The Sartan seperated to look after each realm but soon lost contact with each other, and dissapeared. Centuries pass and a Patryn called Xar manages to escape from the Labyrinth, returning to resucue others. He then began to learn how to reach the other worlds and began to plan their downfall. Escaping from the Labryrinth is the Patryn Haplo, who is sent by Xar to scout the other worlds, sow the seeds of chaos, and undermine the cultures in preparation of the invasion.
reviews in the series
The Seventh Gate
by Weis and Hickman
In the Labyrinth, Marit and Hugh venture out to try and find Alfred. He turns out to be the prisoner of a Labyrinth dragon, which are almost the equal of the dragon-snakes in cruelty and savagery. With the help of the Cursed Blade, they drive it off and rescue Alfred.
On Abarrac...
Into The Labyrinth
by Weis and Hickman
On Abarrach, Xar is attempting to learn the secret of necromancy, but he needs a corpse to test it on. He interrogates the lazar Kleitus about the location of any living Sartan, and Kleitus reveals that Haplo lied to Xar about all the Sartan dying at the hands of the dead; Balthazar and his group...
The Hand of Chaos
by Weis and Hickman
Haplo takes a submersible back to Draknor to retrieve his ship. He finds Samah there— wet, haggard, and lost. The leader of the Council has opened Death's Gate, allowing the dragon-snakes free access to all the four worlds. Haplo decides he is too tired to physically capture Samah and uses his sh...
Serpent Mage
by Weis and Hickman
The novel picks up just where Fire Sea left off. Alfred jumps into Death's Gate as Haplo's ship passes through it, and finds himself in a stasis room like the one he woke up in; in fact, he believes he's on Arianus. Tired, he decides to put himself back to sleep... Only to find someone i...
Fire Sea
by Weis and Hickman
Abarrach, the World of Stone is just that: lava, stone, poisonous fumes, and precious little food that can be grown. The peoples of Abarrach rely on giant rune-inscribed stone pillars called colossi to provide warmth and breathable atmosphere, but the colossi have been failing s...
Elven Star
by Weis and Hickman
Pryan, the World of Fire, does not orbit a sun— at least, not in the normal manner. It is a giant stone sphere containing four suns (similar to a Dyson Sphere), and it is always daytime. The "ground" is not the ground at all, but rather moss and the leaves of huge, mile-high trees; most people do...
Dragon Wing
by Weis and Hickman
Arianus, the World of Air, is composed entirely of porous floating islands, aligned in three basic altitudes. In the Low Realm, the dwarves (called "Gegs", an elven word for "insects") live on the continent Drevlin and cheerfully serve the giant Kicksey-winsey, a city-sized machine that is the so...
