Category: Fantasy Publisher: Orchard House Press
ISBN-10: 9781590920572
Type: Fiction
Pages: 302
Copyright: March 2009
An epic tale weaving magic and intrigue in a mythical Far East setting, where what appears to be real may be nothing more than illusion.
The Battle Against the Darkness has passed into legend. Those who fought together to secure the future of Tonogato are nearly all gone, save a lonely few who must now bear witness to the virtual collapse of the fragile Tonogato Alliance. Violence and intimidation are the new tools of power, the ruthless and the cunning wielding them with near-impunity.
Into this maelstrom falls Satora, a man who long ago gave up interest in the corrupt politics of royal courts, and who has angrily rejected the magic at the very center of his soul. Swept away from his mountain sanctuary by events he cannot control, he finds himself engulfed by the storm of upheaval raging across Tonogato. Forced into using the powers he has forsworn, Satora struggles to harness both magic, and himself, before he succumbs to the darker paths of sorcery.
Overlaying all of the human struggles is the potential destruction of an entire race of beings who had once helped the humans defeat the Darkness. The secret hidden between the lines of a decades-old letter is the sole key to whether their world will vanish into nothingness forever. And Satora is the only one who can find the lock…
Excerpt
The elderly door servant was good at not hearing the insistent arguing emanating from beyond the thin shoji door at his back. Nothing more than strips of wood and translucent rice paper separated him from the tempest in the adjoining room, but he had been trained well. He listened only for the tell-tale approach of footsteps making the tiniest of sounds as they came near the door, when he would turn and slide it open just as the bearer of the footsteps approached. His father, long dead these many years, had trained him to pretend that all else, any sound he might hear behind him, was no more than the rustle of wind in the leaves.
He was therefore startled when a large vase smashed through the framework of the door, narrowly missing his head, and shattered against the hallway wall opposite him. He leapt to his feet just as another, smaller vase followed the first, this one careening through the shoji door right where his head would have been had he not moved in time. It too crashed against the wall before ending up in broken bits on the floor, and then the entire door collapsed in a shambles of tattered paper and broken wood.
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The rookies joining the ranks of this elite core of environmental spies
A half-zythian bard gets caught up in an affair with the Duchess of Highlake. The Duke wants him dead and our hero is forced to flee through a forest that no one has ever returned from.
Danielle and Nina are rescued from their wicked step-mother by Emma the Yellow Dream Train who takes them on adventures. When Nina learns she has the ability to speak to animals, Emma and the other trains teach her how to use it.
