Finally got this today.........
The Great Houses
Immovable. Implacable. Unchanging. Old enough to pass themselves off as immortal, arrogant enough to claim ultimate authority over the Spiral Politic.
The Enemy
Not so much an army as a hostile new kind of history. So ambitious it can re-write worlds, so complex that even calling it by its name seems to underestimate it.
Faction Paradox
Renegades, ritualists, saboteurs and subterfugers, the criminal-cult to end all criminal-cults, happy to be caught in the crossfire and ready to take whatever's needed from the wreckage... assuming the other powers leave behind a universe that's habitable.
The War
A fifty-year-old dispute over the two most valuable territories in existence: "cause" and "effect."
Marking the first five decades of the conflict, THE BOOK OF THE WAR is an A to Z of a self-contained continuum and a complete guide to the Spiral Politic, from the beginning of recordable time to the fall of humanity. Part story, part history and part puzzle-box, this is a chronicle of protocol and paranoia in a War where the historians win as many battles as the soldiers and the greatest victory of all is to hold on to your own past...
Focuses on the first 50 years of the "War in Heaven," the universe-rending conflict in which Faction Paradox and all its rival Houses are irrevocably involved.
Covers the rise and fall of the Faction, the lost history of the Compassion project, the secret origins of the Celestis and perhaps even the nature of the Enemy itself!