The Verdant Passage

The Verdant Passage is a fantasy novel by the American writer Troy Denning, published by TSR in 1991 and the first book of the Prism Pentad.

The book is set on Athas, the desert world of the Dark Sun setting that TSR introduced for the Dungeons and Dragons game in the same year. Its city is Tyr, ruled for a thousand years by the sorcerer-king Kalak, whose magic has left the people living in dust and fear and who is now working on a transformation that would make him immortal and far more dangerous than he already is. A small group comes together to oppose him: a statesman with a taste for manoeuvre, a half-elf slave girl, a dwarven gladiator and others whose interests do not always point the same way. The novel was written to open the campaign setting, and the four books that follow deal with what the revolution sets loose.

Denning went on to write in several shared fantasy worlds, and the Prism Pentad was completed by The Crimson Legion, The Amber Enchantress, The Obsidian Oracle and The Cerulean Storm.