*Now with full-story summary & cover* Okay brutally honest internet, rip my story apart!

Violina’s life was never an easy one. Her late father was a pawn of the mob, and she was frivolously blamed for her mother’s death when she was only three. Still, opting to be a product of her choices rather than her circumstances, she sets out with her joke-cracking friend Lux to build a new life.

A wrench is thrown into the girls’ plans when their latest client refuses to pay the promised fee for capturing a unique trio of exotic creatures. The 21-year-old girls reclaim the beasts via a heist and find another buyer—a mysterious, lovely and deranged woman named Vexia who offers more money than they could spend in a lifetime. Unfortunately, the drop-off goes awry, gunshots are fired, and Violina and Lux find themselves on the run.

In their flight, the girls stumble through a rift that takes them back in time 500 years. Terrified that their interference with the past would ripple through to their home time and erase the world they know, they believe they have no choice but to restore history to its original course—a task that would require killing Schlau Poltz—a man whose life they had just saved, and rescuing Kza—the cruelest genocidist the world had ever seen.

Captured and exiled for their crimes, Violina and Lux are cast into a pit. Finding herself wounded and destitute, Violina resolves that if she survives, she would dedicate her life to ridding the world of its evils instead of just isolating herself from them.

Another rift opens and the girls escape into the post-apocalyptic future. They learn that the Second Sun, the object worshiped for centuries as God Himself had reduced the world to a toxic wasteland. Those still alive found themselves belonging to one of two groups: the Separatists—fanatical lunatics bent on driving all of mankind (including themselves) to extinction, and the refugees struggling to survive the onslaught. But when Violina discovers the leaders of the refugees are just as deranged as their enemies, she initiates a violent takeover and leads a campaign against the Separatists herself. The ensuing battles prove catastrophic for both sides, and nearly all of humanity is destroyed.

Surrounded by the smoldering and bloodied ruins of their failure, Violina and Lux learn that the Second Sun that had caused the apocalypse was not actually God, as people had always believed, but a weapon of Kza’s from the Age of the Clerics. They reason that if they were to go back in time and kill him, they could prevent the horrific events of the future from ever even happening in the first place. Not long after, Violina comes face to face with Kza and takes her opportunity to shoot him, but to her bewilderment, the critically wounded Kza simply smiles and forgives her as if he has everything under control, then escapes through another time rift.

With unwavering determination, Violina and Lux decide to take a more direct approach to save mankind by destroying the Second Sun itself before its ascension. This quest takes them from the beginning of the world to the end, but in every era they find mankind to be greedy and vile. Violina reaches a turning point when the very people she is trying to help betray her and brutally murder the ever-lovable and innocent Lux. Violina realizes the only one worth saving is gone, and in a heartbeat she would trade all the world’s lives for Lux’s. In a crusade of lethal justice, she teams up with Kza and fights her way to the Second Sun.

After a brutal trail of death and destruction, Violina comes to a soul-churning realization: The future cannot be changed. Everything she had done to alter history was what actually caused the original events to transpire, and it was she who had caused the apocalypse via the Second Sun.

In the end, Violina learns that Kza was an honorable person with noble goals. It was only because of slander by the corrupt that he had gained such a notorious reputation. With mankind destroyed and the Second Sun in their control, they set out to build a new and better world.

'Death In Samarkand' is a fairly played-out plot, and you have to do something really unusual with the notion of 'trying to escape your fate only ensures its occurrence' to justify its reuse.

Going by the blurb alone, these rifts seem to just 'happen' and that can strike a reader as too convenient, so I'd be careful in how and when they're deployed as plot progression devices.

Open with a clear, concise position setting-wise. I get the desire to just jump into the who and what but without a where and when, it all seems to just float in some abstract play space. The synopsis is not the place to be coy or vague.

Stick to main plot points, and don't write twists as twists (so avoid terms like 'however' and 'despite this' -- they're just taking up precious textual real estate). Just lay out how things happen as though it's history and you're an impartial recorder of that history.

Save any sort of navel-gazing, theme, etc for the writing itself. No one's going to care what your main character thinks or questions in the synopsis.

Excise as many adverbs as possible. Despite Strunk and White's advice there (not to mention King's), adverbs do have their place in writing. Absolutely. But in a bare-bones synopsis, again, they're just flab. We don't need to know 'how' characters are treated or even how they act. Just the facts, ma'am.

Finally, you have enough plot material there for more than one book. Especially with the time-jumping. So trying to cram all that into one book might make it look like you're rushing or being overly ambitious. To make that one book, I'd want to see an ending that matches the beginning and everything in-between serving the transition from point A to point Z. Not getting a sense of that from this synopsis.

In summary, step back. Then step back again. Look at what happens as 'happened'. And remember that plot is what happens, story is how that affects the characters and how they react to it. A synopsis/summary should have as little story as possible.