Mana Bond

At 0600 a rift opened in the sky over Fenway. By noon, Sergeant Jack Mason's squad was down from twelve to six, command had stopped answering on every channel, and the things pouring into Boston had stopped staying dead.

Then the rift tore wide, the street split open, and a column of silver and violet light reached up to meet it. When the light started dragging Ramirez, the kid on point, into the sky, Jack did the only thing he knew how to do. He grabbed on and refused to let go.

He wakes three days later in Duskhollow, a village in the Verdant Reach of a world called Aethelgard, where a healer named Seraphina Vale tells him he fell out of the sky. Magic here comes in two kinds: Aether, the power of light and order, and Nether, the power of shadow and ruin. Most people can channel one. A very few can channel both. Jack's eyes are now two different colors and his aura burns silver and violet at once, which makes him either the strongest dual-mana mage she has ever seen or a man about to die very messily.

Jack never asked to be special. He cares about the squad he left behind and the hand that slipped out of his. If power is what it takes to learn what happened to them, he will master every bit of it.