The People of the Crater

Garin Featherstone is a war-hero pilot with no war left to fight, until the explorer Gregory Farson hires him to fly into a strange blue haze rising from the Antarctic ice.

Garin's plane goes down inside it. He wakes in Tav, a hidden crater world where a scholarly lizard folk live among giant bees and stranger creatures, served by machines left by the Ancient Ones who ruled before them. The last of those rulers are at war. Thrala, the Daughter, has been carried off by Kepta and the Black Ones into the Caves of Darkness, and the deadly Great Mists are only days away. With a rod of strange metal and little else, the outlander goes down into the dark to bring her back.