Threshold (novel)

Threshold is a fantasy novel written by Sara Douglass in 1997.

The story concerns a glassworker slave named Tirzah, forced into slavery because of her father's debts. She's tasked with helping building the eponymous Threshold, a pyramid made partially with huge glass panels. She meets a Magus named Boaz, hiding behind a Magi exterior a little too well. The Magi base a religion and magic power around the One, the number of all creation. And Threshold is being built to allow them to tap into the power of Creation and become immortal.

Once Threshold is completed, though, it... doesn't go quite as planned.

This novel provides examples of:

 * Anti Hero: Boaz.
 * Bad Powers Bad People: All of the Magi.
 * Death By Childbirth:
 * Extra Ore Dinary: Being an Elemental lets you speak to glass and metal.
 * Gone Horribly Right: Threshold lets the Magi tap into the Vale... only it
 * Heel Face Turn:
 * Infant Immortality: Brutally averted. One of the first things Tirzah sees after arriving in Gesholme is a newborn baby having its head splattered against a wall.
 * Jerkass: Magus Boaz, Chad-Nezzar.
 * Magical Gesture: The swirling colors required to.
 * Nightmare Fuel: A zombified child speaking taunts from the Big Bad to his dead father? More than a little creepy!
 * Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
 * Precursors: Soulenai.
 * Rape and Revenge: Also Revenge Before Reason.
 * Secret Art: Elementals and Cartomancers.
 * You Cannot Grasp the True Form: The Vale, when Tirzah and the others look into it.