The Fall Of Neskaya

More than four decades ago, best-selling author Marion Zimmer Bradley first envisioned the world of Darkover - a frigid world lit by the dim glow of a dying red giant star. On this mysterious planet of the Bloody Sun, a generational starship from faraway Terra crash-landed, stranding her colonists in a land of unknown dangers and unimagined potential.
Now in The Fall of Neskaya, the lands of Darkover are fragmented into a multitude of small belligerent realms torn apart by constant border conflict.
High in the mountainous Hellers, Corin Leynier, adolescent son of a minor nobleman, wakes from a nightmare of a raging forest fire, only to find that the fire is real. Running toward the fire lines, Corin fights to suppress waves of nausea and dizziness - feelings that have become more and more frequent over the passing months - to help his kinsmen. As all the inhabitants of Verdanta lands, nobleman and commoner alike, struggle hopelessly to contain the worst fire in memory, Lord Leynier sends a desperate message to his nearest neighbors, The Storns of High Kinnally, with an appeal for help and passage through Storn lands to Tramontana Tower. But despite the tradition of fire truce Lord Storn refuses aid to the Leyniers because of an ancient feud. When all seems lost, and Verdanta doomed by uncontrollable flames, help arrives.
In a terrible time of strife and war, when this unique fantasy world is divided into a multitude of small belligerent domains vying for power and land, one corrupt, ambitious tyrant will stop at nothing-even the use of terrifying matrix weapons-to control all of Darkover!