At ten years old, the Heir of Jasad flees a massacre that takes her entire family. At fifteen, she buries her first body. At twenty, the clock is ticking on Sylvia's third attempt at home. Nizahl's armies have laid waste to Jasad and banned magic across the four remaining kingdoms. Fortunately, Sylvia's magic is as good at playing dead as she is. When the Nizahl Heir tracks a group of Jasadis to Sylvia's village, the quiet life she's crafted unravels. Calculating and cold, Arin's tactical brilliance is surpassed only by his hatred for magic. When a mistake exposes Sylvia's magic, Arin offers her an escape: compete as Nizahl's Champion in the Alcalah tournament and win immunity from persecution. In exchange, Arin will use her as bait to draw out the Jasadis he's hunting. To win the deadly Alcalah, Sylvia must work with Arin to free her trapped magic, all while staying a step ahead of his efforts to uncover her identity. But as the two grow closer, Sylvia realizes winning her freedom as Nizahl's Champion means destroying any chance of reuniting Jasad under her banner. The scorched kingdom is rising again, and Sylvia will have to choose between the life she's earned and the one she left behind.

This book collects the artwork, research, and arts-based educational research understandings around the theme of "connections". It emerges from the 3rd bi-annual 2020 Artful Inquiry Research Group symposium on the theme of "connections". This symposium brought together artists, community members, teachers, students, researchers, and teachers through a virtual platform to explore the way(s) that the arts help to connect people, ideas, places, etc., in this pandemic reality. The book explores four themes: socially engaged connections, cultural connects, personal and pedagogical connections, and making connections during the COVID-19 pandemic. Art plays a predominant role in each chapter, as authors weave together their research and art-based understandings. This book is a valuable teaching resource for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in anthropology, digital ethnography, autoethnography, cultural studies, creativity, and communications. It is of interest to higher education students exploring methodologies and academic researchers and teachers in the fields of creative practice and creativity studies, communications, critical studies, sociology, and the arts.