Song for Eldaru

Bearing questions in their hearts, the five companions continue their journey with pain and sorrow behind them and hope ahead of them. But with every passing day the land of Telmérion continues to spiral into chaos and strife. They seek answers, answers ancient and forgotten, in the only place that they know to look, but will these answers be enough to confront the ever more tangible darkness and otherworldly violence that descends upon their people? Or shall the secrets that are revealed prove to be a greater burden even than the questions? Or rather shall they truly be a light in darkness, a hope in despair, that can carry and lead them even when they return anew to the conflict to which their hearts are inexorably being drawn, even unto the final confrontation in which the fate of their world shall be decided?Lightborn is the centerpiece of the Dawnbringer series of novels set in the world of Irándiel, upon the small continent of Telmérion, cold and rugged and yet inhabited since the beginning of human history by the first family of humankind. Though the setting is high fantasy—a work of co-creative imagination fashioning a mythical world with its own history and geography—the plot and the ins-and-outs of the world are deeply realistic, portraying as it were an ancient and long-forgotten past of our own world. Or more precisely, what is offered here is a mythical exposition of the true past that we all share—with very little magic or other fantasy tropes, but with a great deal of "e;magic,"e; in other words, a world filled with wonders and terrors of all kinds, from the ancient guardians of the world, the Anaíon, to vicious and deadly beasts such as dragons, eötenga, and vru'ádach. The characters thus find themselves caught in the cosmic battle between light and darkness, between the weakness of love and the power of hate, which casts its rays and its shadows also into the heart of every man and woman. The journey marked out before their feet calls for integrity, fidelity, and heroism, and also something more, something that lies at the heart of every good adventure and every life, and which is the very measure of man.