When Jiang Wei, the last idealist of Shu Han, takes up the chancellor’s heavy feather fan amid the autumn winds of Wuzhang Plains, a stirring forty-year epic begins.
Jiang Wei stands in the fading light at Jian Ge, the tattered map in his hands flapping in the wind. Behind him lie lands ravaged by war; before him, Sima Zhao’s iron cavalry sweeps across the realm. Everyone says the Han mandate is spent. Even the young emperor in Chengdu has begun to lose himself in song and dance, but Jiang Wei refuses to believe it.
He remembers the chancellor’s final words of counsel by lamplight. They were not the charge to preserve an empire, but a plea to hold fast to an ideal. In the cold, unsparing records of the Zizhi Tongjian, he is no more than a defeated general making a desperate last stand. But in this tale, written to endure through the ages, he will show the world that even when the stars fall, their fading light can still pierce the darkness.
