Below is the complete list of Margaret Weis’ Death Gate Cycle books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Death Gate Cycle Books
with Tracy Hickman
About Death Gate Cycle
The Death Gate Cycle is a seven-volume epic fantasy series written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the long-running creative partnership also responsible for major works in the Dragonlance and Darksword settings. Beginning with Dragon Wing, the series is built around an unusually ambitious cosmology: an ancient magical catastrophe has broken the original world apart into separate elemental realms, leaving their inhabitants largely unaware that other worlds even exist. What initially appears to be a collection of distinct fantasy settings gradually reveals itself as one interconnected history.
Central to that history are two powerful peoples, the Sartan and the Patryns. Their ancient conflict reshaped civilization when the Sartan sundered the world and imprisoned the Patryns within the Labyrinth, a brutal realm designed to contain them. Generations later, the Patryn Xar escapes and establishes the Nexus. He sends Haplo, one of his most capable followers, through the Death Gate to explore the separated worlds, gather information, and prepare them for eventual Patryn domination.
Haplo gives the sprawling series its strongest continuous viewpoint. He begins as a loyal servant of Xar, conditioned by the horrors of the Labyrinth and convinced that the Sartan are responsible for his people’s suffering. His journeys gradually expose contradictions in that history. Different societies have developed independently since the Sundering, and the worlds he encounters reveal that neither the Sartan nor the Patryns fit comfortably into the simple moral categories he has inherited.
The early novels emphasize exploration. Arianus, introduced in Dragon Wing, is a realm of floating islands where humans, elves, and dwarves struggle over scarce resources. Later journeys move into radically different environments, including Pryan’s immense forest world, Abarrach’s underground realm of stone and molten fire, and Chelestra, the water world. Weis and Hickman give each realm its own political tensions, cultures, ecological problems, and relationship with magic rather than treating them as interchangeable stages for the same adventure. Penguin Random House identifies Fire Sea, for example, with Abarrach and the surviving Sartan who remain there under increasingly desperate conditions.
Alfred becomes the crucial counterweight to Haplo. A seemingly awkward and ineffectual figure when first encountered, he is eventually revealed as a Sartan, making the developing relationship between the two men particularly significant. They are inheritors of opposing civilizations, yet circumstances repeatedly force them to cooperate. Their changing understanding of one another becomes one of the series’ most important ways of questioning inherited hatred, obedience, and the assumption that ancient enemies must remain enemies forever.
By the later volumes, the separate-world structure gives way to a more unified struggle. Xar’s ambitions, the truth behind the Sundering, the Labyrinth, and forces that benefit from continued conflict become increasingly important. Characters and discoveries that once seemed confined to individual realms begin converging, so the final books depend heavily on what has already been established. The Seventh Gate brings Haplo, Alfred, and Marit together for the concluding confrontation, confirming how far the story has moved from Haplo’s original reconnaissance missions.
That cumulative design makes The Death Gate Cycle markedly different from episodic fantasy series. Its seven books form one completed narrative, with revelations deliberately revising the reader’s understanding of earlier events. The shifting worlds provide scale and variety, but Haplo’s transformation—from an agent carrying out Xar’s plans to a man capable of questioning the history and loyalties that shaped him—provides the emotional spine. The result is one of Weis and Hickman’s most elaborate original fantasy constructions: a story of fractured worlds in which the deeper problem is the inherited division between the people living within them.