Her city was put to the fire; her family enslaved. For centuries she served the shadowmancer. Now, he too has been taken from her.
The Source must be reopened and the Lost Continent released. The Day of Darkness once came and nearly destroyed humanity.
It will come again and she will have her revenge.
Awakening, Watchers of the Light Book 2 Coming Soon.
Book1, Among the Shadows is out now.
#ChooseASide #DarknessIsComing #WhoIsTheNewShadowmancer?
In an age lost to myth, all human life nearly vanished from the Earth. War erupted between men and demon. The Blood Rain fell from the skies, the land was scorched and torn. The waters came and completed the ruin of the world.
In time, people ceased believing in such tales. This the Darkness wanted. It waited until it was forgotten, a time when most thought it foolish to listen to the warnings of their ancestors. Among the shadows malice lurked, and signs from the Light were ignored. Centuries passed.
A shadowmancer arose to launch a new Scourge. Evils unseen since the ancient wars returned from the Abyss. The modern world would soon fall. No men could stand against them. So they thought.
Six Watchers, gifted by the Light, stood to meet the Darkness and destroyed the Dark One’s legions.
While the world had been unaware, all had nearly been lost. Now the shadows had receded, their terror extinguished. The Followers had been burnt by the Light.
Except one.
If a lost land could be raised, if the ageless weapons restored, she would have her revenge. New hordes would be brought through the veil. The final merging of both worlds completed. Ancient tales of the end of days no longer legend.
An Awakening.
Will the Watchers, who had turned back what emerged from the shadows, be able to stand against a new onslaught? One that would leave every land in desolation and enslave all whom survive?
They will not fight alone. More of their kind, wielding gifts of great power, have also come forth. The Light surges in us all, but among the Watchers it is untamed and unbound. Only the can turn back what is coming.
In these last hours, they are our only hope.
Awakening, Watchers of the Light Book 2 Coming Soon.
Book1, Among the Shadows is out now. #ChooseASide #DarknessIsComing #WhoIsTheNewShadowmancer?
Slave, soldier, lover, hero, saint,—his life mirrored the cataclysmic world into which he was born. His memory will outlast the ages.
St. Patrick’s Day comes and goes every year with its parties and parades, yet very few spend any time getting to know the holiday’s namesake. Why is one man, centuries later, so remembered?
This is where Stephen Lawhead’s novel, Patrick: Son of Ireland, paints a vivid picture of Patrick’s world long lost to us. It is true what little we know of Patrick comes from a few surviving writings by his hand, and from others passing down traditions. Lawhead uses this framework to fill in the details of Patrick’s slavery in Ireland which shapes his life to come. We also witness his escape back to Britain, and in Lawhead’s version, travels to Rome. Everything in Lawhead’s vision of Patrick’s life is detailed and plausible, transporting readers to these ancient eras. You will travel the stark contrasts of Celtic Ireland to the fading glory of late imperial Rome. We don’t get to see Patrick’s triumphant transformation of Ireland — we know that part of the story. This is the origin story on how he became that saint, that legend.
Totalitarian Fiction. Only one of these I haven’t read, the rest multiple times. A few hundred pages can get you quite an education.
When Sauron was destroyed at the end of the Third Age, was that the end of evil? No, as Tolkien knew, evil would try to creep across the land again. He had began to outline what would unfold in the generations after The Lord of the Rings, prefaced on the nature of evil:
If evil is not faced up to and confronted, it will spread…the Dark Tree, the concept of growing evil…a dark tree whose roots can never be fully destroyed so that evil will once again arise if the tree is left untended or unwatched. When we do not actively keep watch for evil, it will return…Sometimes in order to preserve the good in the world, we need to step put of the Shire with hope in our hearts, and journey to the darkest places whatever the cost. – “In Deep Geek”
The sequel was never completed, but Tolkien’s vision and warnings about evil live on. Learn more about J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfinished sequel to The Lord of the Rings here.
Christopher Tolkien, son of J.R.R. Tolkien, and the person in charge of his father’s literary estate, passed away at the age of 95 on the 16th of January. After his father passed away in 1973, Christopher began a massive, decades-long project of publishing his father’s unfinished Middle-Earth histories:
In 1977, he collected and published The Silmarillion, a work that Tolkien had intended to publish, which explored the origins of Middle-earth and set up the conflict that he explored in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
In the years that followed, he continued to produce new volumes of Tolkien’s unpublished writings, releasing Unfinished Tales in 1980, the 12-volume History of Middle-earth between 1982 and 1996, and edited and completed a number of longer narratives and translations of epic poems, including The Children of Húrin (2007), The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009), The Fall of Arthur (2013), Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, (2014), Beren and Lúthien (2017), and The Fall of Gondolin (2018).
As Gandalf said,
…the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it. White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
The Wheel of Time series, which James Rigney, writing as Robert Jordan…is a true successor, a true heir, to the kind of mythically philological trail of creation that Tolkien had blazed some fifty years earlier. Like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the world of the Wheel is a myth behind myths. The wondrous Age of Legends, the ‘far past’ of Jordan’s plot-lines in The Wheel of Time, is our mythically Atlantean past just as surely as is Tolkien’s story of the fall of Númenor from the Silmarillion. – Michael Livingston
For those who haven’t dived into Jordan’s epic 14 volume Wheel of Time Fantasy series, you’ll be hearing much more about it in coming months as Amazon Prime begins production on a television adaptation. Will they be able to adapt the voluminous, sometimes dense, successor to Middle-Earth? Or will it follow the troubled road of shows based on Shannara and The Sword of Truth? At least they have a complete book series to work from and can avoid the angst Game of Thrones fans have endured.
The newest printing of Among the Shadows features the latest version of Dark Snowfall, a Lost Tale in which Milena steps through the veil into a troubling winter encounter. This should also be in the ebook edition soon, so there is no better time to Join the War and Choose a Side.
What if you could enter someone’s dreams? Inside their dreamworld you would discover their greatest fears. You could use their darkest secrets against them.
This darkness you found now wielded as a weapon to kill.
In Morgan L. Busse‘s Mark of the Raven, Lady Selene has been gifted as a dreamwalker. The eldest daughter in the House of Ravenwood, she has inherited what generations of women in her family before her have also known. All seven Great Houses of the realms have differing giftings, but her mother teaches Selene the purpose of hers.
She is to become an assassin for hire and serve the dark schemes of her mother.
I have read many books where the Light and Darkness face off. Usually the characters are either-or: Either bad, or good. In Raven, we see Lady Selene struggle with what is apparently her fate. She believes she has no choice. It’s not clear, even when faced with the Light, if she will, or can, veer off the path she was born into. Morgan Busse tells Selene’s story of struggle with the depth that will resonate with people in the real world. And that’s what makes fiction like this a powerful force:
Among the fantastic, truth is revealed. Reality in the midst of fantasy.
Not coincidentally, I’m sure, I had just finished Lacey Sturm’s telling of her real-life story in The Reason. Surrounded by the Darkness she nearly gave in, but she to encountered the Light and had to make a choice. Lady Selene’s world may be fiction, but it is a story many find themselves in.
In Mark of the Raven, Morgan L. Busse has crafted an absorbing tale, where the reader will viscerally experience the struggle of Lady Selene, and be propelled to a breathless ending.
And on 
Darrick Dean 