Where have all the seals and birds gone? Captain Hattenel, a Half-Elven, ranger, joins Voron, a disreputable sea captain, to solve the mystery. They are captured by dog-headed magic workers after falling into a trap. They must escape before the heavy gravity of the alternate world or the dog-heads kill them. --- A Far Isle Half-Elven short story.If you liked this story, please review. ThanksAll life has disappeared from a rookery far from Half-Elven shores, south in enemy territory. Voron, a disreputable ship’s captain, asks permission to investigate the mystery, a request that lands on Captain Hattenel’s desk. Her curiosity tweaked, she decides to investigate the conflict between Voron’s dubious reputation and the intelligence displayed in his book about his explorations. Captain Hattenel discovers Voron not only projects a powerful negative glamour, guaranteed to repulse any Half-Elven warrior, but his shields are stronger than most. When she learns he plans to investigate the mysterious rookery on his own, Hattenel decides to join him – only to discover a secret that can destroy their world … and their careers.While exploring the deserted island, the two are catapulted into a world of dog-headed magic workers. Hattenel an Voron must escape before gravity or the dog-heads kill them.

When Nicholas sets out to confront his destiny danger is not just at the end of his journey; death and hardship lurk all along the way.This book is a collection of highly inspirational poems. It stylishly unveils success principles of life and living even as it entertains the reader. The highly illuminating lines of each topic stir up the reader’s imagination so as to transport them into a realm of poetic inspiration. The equally wonderful illustration further interprets the words and phrases in diverse perspectives, entertaining the reader thereby. Every lover of poetry will benefit tremendously from the book. It is a book that always attracts the reader back to it over and over again because of the author’s unique style of writing poetry. Let every reader who desires to benefit from the book take time to go over the lines of each poem for therein may lie the word that will ignite in them the inspiration they need to go ahead at every point in their life’s journey.

Book 4 of the Auralia Thread series The king is missing. His people are trapped as the woods turn deadly. Underground, the boy called Rescue has found an escape. Hopes are failing across The Expanse. The forests, once beautiful, are now haunted and bloodthirsty. House Abascar's persecuted people risk their lives to journey through those predatory trees. They seek a mythic city - Abascar's last, best hope for refuge - where they might find the source of Auralia's colors. They journey without their king. During a calamitous attempt to rescue some of his subjects from slavery, Cal-raven vanished. But his helper, the ale boy, falling through a crack in the earth, has discovered a slender thread of hope in the dark. He will dare to lead a desperate company up the secret river. Meanwhile, with a dragon's help, the wandering mage Scharr ben Fray is uncovering history's biggest lie - a deception that only a miracle can repair. Time is running out for all those entangled in The Auralia Thread. But hope and miracles flicker wherever Auralia’s colors are found. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Mayne Reid was an Irish-American author who wrote a number of popular action and adventure books in the same vein as one of his most famous contemporaries, Robert Louis Stevenson. His action packed books depict various settings, including the frontier and Wild West.

The Fallen God is the second book in my Nomads of Gorn three part trilogy, it continues the travels of the Almadra started in my first book “Nomads of the Gods” Arn, Andra, Osh and the rest of the tribe travel to the forests of Caltarine, there they meet the Norgonie, the people of the forest who’s Queen Arn knows well, lots of action and adventure and a little romance, enjoy.The Fallen God is the secound book in my Nomads of Gorn three part trilogy, it continues the travels of the Almadra started in my first book “Nomads of the Gods” Arn, Andra, Osh and the rest of the tribe travel to the forests of Caltarine, there they meet the Norgonie, the people of the forest who’s Queen Arn knows well, but unknown to them an ancient mechanical menace has come to Gron and it has the power to destroy them all. The book also brings back the hate filled Shadowman, brother of the King, he joins forces with the giant mechanical monster and sets out to fulfill his revenge on the Nomads, meanwhile in the forest stronghold of the Norgonie Andra must fight for her life against vicious Sargar cats and a kidnapping by the son of the Queen and when she is taken to the Forbidden City she finds flesh eaters, horrific dangers, people from her past and something she thought was lost. New adventures also await the philosopher Osh and Endo, for the young Sandjar must fight to free his people for the slave pits under the Norgonie city, and Osh comes face to face with a ancient scholar he thought was long dead, fully illustrated with over 50 chapter drawings it has lots of action, romance and intrigue and is yours FREE for the reading, enjoy.

Paul had a secretive job that he’d always kept hidden from his girlfriend. Eventually their continuous arguing over his job caused them to break up. One night, Paul found himself in need of Norma’s help, and she decided to use her leverage to find out just exactly what he had been hiding. Dark comedy.When Sam Marker ran away from her old life, all she needed was a job and somewhere to live. Anything would do. And then, one fateful day, she saw that the town of Rippon was looking for a new gardener...Unfortunately for Sam, the 'garden' is actually a cemetery, and it just so happens to contain the deadliest grave in the world. As she tries to adjust to her new life in the sleepy little town, Sam finds herself increasingly drawn into a strange double life. Dark forces are gathering in Rippon, seeking access to the Devil's grave, and soon she finds herself trapped in the middle of a struggle that could decide the fate of the world.

Odyssey Bourne Force is a top-secret project run by a covert organization possessing mankind's most formidable discovery: an indestructible monolithic stone door uncovered during an excavation in Egypt. Realizing the consequences of its astonishing properties, O.B.F. must now race against time to save Earth from forces that threaten to alter the fabric of life itself. Book 1 of a series.Forty year old reclusive KATE WILLARD is struck down with unexplainable nightmares of violence and brutality. Desperate for answers, Kate sets out on a spiraling adventure, beginning at an out of town shopping mall where she is drawn inside a quaint, mystical shop. She discovers a bloodstone, and upon contact, it crudely unlocks powers within her that she has trouble controlling. Her subsequent dreams uncover Divisions; a covert, civilian organization running a top secret project known as the Odyssey Bourne Force - so secretive they deny their very existence. Divisions has been guarding and utilizing an ancient stone door, allowing these 'non-existent' heroes access to explore and build up alliances with worlds beyond our own. After a rocky beginning, Kate joins Divisions, and falls in love with OBF team member DOCTOR PETER REYNOLDS, a brilliant archaeologist who excavated the stone door in Egypt. Amongst his vast collection of artifacts, he possesses a second, identical bloodstone. Together, they learn she is the reincarnation of an ancient Queen who miraculously stopped an evil force from wiping out humanity six thousand years ago. According to one of Kate’s harrowing visions, this was accomplished at a tragic price. However, the reincarnation process was imperfect - leaving Kate with disjointed memories that hide the vital truth. Meanwhile, Kate’s connection with the stones has alerted KALVICH, ex-god and Supreme Ruler of the Trimadian hybrid race to assign a mission to his most trusted friend and second in command, the nefarious LORD TALOKTA. He must deliver, at all costs, this valuable cargo, including the bloodstones to Heliostronus, the Trimadian home planet. An enigmatic ceremony has been planned, and Kalvich will do anything to possess Kate and her unique powers. During Kate’s first off world mission to help the indigenous Cantal people’s rebellion on the planet Ahmadeus, she and her team are kidnapped by Talokta’s fleet. Not only is Kate contending with an internal identity crisis, but unknown to her, a devious blend of techno-sorcery and subliminal manipulation is seducing her mind. As Kate’s team mates are facing death, or worse - enslavement inside the dreaded Mines of Heliostronus, an innocent Kate is hot in the spotlight and all is reliant on her - but who can Kate rely on, if not herself? Even with aid from a seemingly nice pair of elderly rebel gods - who breach the number one rule of non-interference - it could already be too late. Desperate to warn Earth - the team, with a sedated Kate, plunge into a daring escape, but at the last moment, are caught. The shocking conclusion has the OBF team facing alien mind-altering experimentation, humanity facing a new world order, and Kate led towards a dangerously, unpredictable future where she holds the destiny to life itself. Is it the end...or just the beginning.

When you’re about to get the chop in the dog-eat-dog motor trade and the blonde with a brace of sawn-off shotguns in her bag is eyeing up an ‘80s muscle car, there’s only one thing left to do – reach for the chicken suit! Another short story from Roger Busby which will entertain you and amuse with the pitfalls of the motor trade.Lately Jack Bowen had taken to wearing the chicken suit in the morning. He’d get to work early, before the others arrived, lock the door of his prefab office, take the suit out of the cupboard where it had hung all those years and slip it on, just for a few minutes. So where was the harm in that? The yellow plumage was a little ratty now and when he put the head on the beak sagged forlornly as he strutted up and down flapping the stubby wings. All the same, it felt good; took him back to the old days when he and John Tully were the top dogs at Lomax Ford, beating the sales target every time and picking up the cut glass decanters and all the other trinkets at the end of the month when the figures came out.Jack had bought the Wurlitzer to hang onto the same memories; picked it up caked in dirt at a junk auction, cleaned it up good as new until the chrome and plastic gleamed. When Betty finally got exasperated and threw it out, he’d brought it to the office, and in his lunch break would plug it in and watch the coloured lights flicker up and down the tubes; press one of the buttons from which the paper slips with the song titles had long since disappeared and feel the thrill of anticipation as the selector arm plucked a 45 from the stack and placed it on the turntable, the needle going down…Ricky Nelson singing “My babe”. Those were the days. When Big John Tully took the UK Ford Salesman of the Year Award for the third time running he’d put on his big confident smile and told Jack: “Jackie, kid, we’re wasting our talents busting a gut for Lomax when we could be coining it for ourselves!” Gone straight out and sweet talked the bank into a loan to buy Stan Gifford’s place on The Old Kent Road; clinched the deal on the strength of poaching a fair chunk of the Lomax trade. That was John all over, the wheeler-dealer, and Jack, who’d always played straight-arrow to this flamboyant showman, leafing through the Glass’s Guide and shaking his head whenever a punter grew over optimistic, had naturally thrown in with him. “Ha-ha Jackie boy, we’ve got it made,” John told him in his booming voice, arm thrown around his shoulder, “you and me, kiddo, we’re set up for the good life.” And so they were in those distant days before Tully went over the top, took to wearing cowboy boots and watching John Wayne DVD’s on a giant home cinema rig he’d set up in the back room, leaving Jack to run the business; before he named his only son after the Duke; before he snuffed it on the day Jack sold a blinged-up Bentley to a minor Saudi royal and Tully overdid the celebration; choked himself to death on a T-bone steak with pepper sauce.

Completely disillusioned and weary, Sally Wentworth a passionate Art Historian and writer lost her job, is rejected by her boyfriend and is denied publishing her book. A strange encounter with Pierre de Prince an artist and inventor of the 18th century sets her on a journey to unravel his mysterious disappearance and discover his last invention.Completely disillusioned and weary, Sally Wentworth a passionate Art Historian and writer is rejected by her boyfriend, lost her job and is denied publishing her book. She has a strange encounter with Pierre de Prince an artist and inventor of the 18th century who asks her to disclose the murderers responsible for his disappearance. She is to get in touch with Ambrose de Prince his grandson, who has been given a mysterious box that would reveal who the murderers are. Unknown to Sally, she does not realize that Ambrose is in the year 2009, when she corresponds with him in 2013. The two must work out their time difference before the murderers of Pierre de Prince carry out their dastardly act to silence them.

A pair of lectures from one of the twentieth century’s most mesmerizing speakers Lawrence Durrell was in his early twenties when, tired of the stiffness of London life, he took his family to live in Corfu. Interwar Greece, whose hard beds and mosquito swarms Durrell documented so tenderly in Prospero’s Cell, was no more. In the first of this pair of lectures, given during a 1970s visit to California, Durrell recalls those days, talking of family, poetry, and the joy of the islands as no other writer can. When war came to the Mediterranean, Durrell was swept into diplomatic service, an adventure he recounts in his second lecture. Though a diplomat of the modern world, he served under men whose experience stretched back to the days before the telephone, when solutions for crises had to be devised by the ambassador, and not phoned in from London. These two lectures on long-vanished worlds are an elegant demonstration of the evocative power of Durrell’s unmatched storytelling.

A Conyn the Barbarian story.Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional.Conyn, a pirate, puts herself in charge and investigates a strange island with mystic waters.A Gender Switch Adventure.Latium 310 BC. In book 9 of his famous History of Rome Livy tells how the Romans, drained by their expansionist war against the Samnites in the south, were in need of a victory and rich booty. The most alluring prey within easy reach were the wealthy Etruscans just to their north but these were protected by the impenetrable barrier of the Cimina Mountains, reputedly haunted by evil spirits and demons. Marcus Fabius Cesus, brother to one of the consuls for the year and a well-known general, volunteers to seek a path through the wilderness. In Livy’s words“He had been brought up in Caere, and was thoroughly conversant with the Etruscan language and literature. There is authority for asserting that at that time Roman boys were, as a rule, instructed in Etruscan literature as they now are in Greek, but I think the probability is that there was something remarkable about the man who displayed such boldness in disguising himself and mingling with the enemy. He is said to have been accompanied by only one servant, and during their journey they only made brief inquiries as to the nature of the country and the names of its leading men, lest they should make some startling blunder in conversing with the natives and so be found out. They went disguised as shepherds, with their rustic weapons, each carrying two bills and two heavy javelins. But neither their familiarity with the language nor the fashion of their dress nor their implements afforded them so much protection as the impossibility of believing that any stranger would enter the Ciminian forest.”This is the tale of Marcus’ extraordinary journey; the tale of his slave, Janu, and his love for Orphea; the tale of the mysterious origins of the Etruscan race; the tale of the immortal priestesses, daughters of the god Arius, waiting to fulfill their sacred mission; the tale of Hanibald, the middle-eastern mystic who seeks religious solace in his lonely hermitage; but most of all it is the tale of the Etruscan civilisation’s swansong.Pier Isa della Rupe is steeped in the lore of her native Cimina mountains and this book is the fruit of careful research, accurate down to the last detail. But scholarship fades into the background as the reader is swept along on a torrent of rich, descriptive language perhaps rare in our minimalist-inspired age. This is no dry history but a visionary tale, a magical evocation of a place and its people, an inspired flow of words which I personally found an intense pleasure to translate. I hope that many people will be able to have the pleasure of reading it.PIER ISA DELLA RUPEETRUSCAN SWAN SONGCHAPTER 1Legend has it that Thetia, the famous Sybil of the Sacred Forests of the Cimina mountains, lived isolated from the world for thousands of years in a dark, windswept cavern under the gaunt Acqua Zita crag to the north of the Cimini Mountain chain. Her only companions were wolves, bears and a beautiful white lion that her mother, the nymph Athea, had given her. Her den was an intricate labyrinth of tunnels hollowed out of the volcanic rock which stretched down to where a hot spring bubbled from the bowels of the earth. Among her collection of archaic documents written on palm leaves an ancient roll was found, half scorched, which claimed in mysterious verse that the world was created from the Cimina mountains.

A gentle sibyl is on a quest to make peace with the invaders of her exotic world. Things go wrong and her bodyguard is provoked to bloody violence. Their escape becomes a desperate fight for survival.Insight and intuition are the gentle powers of the wise and benevolent Oracle of Telluria. She is on a quest to make peace when assailed by the clone, human female invaders. A sinister alien commands the women and has nefarious plans for the gentle sibyl. The Oracle's bodyguard delivers her from captivity. Their desperate escape becomes a fight for survival. The Oracle must choose between the lives of others or the loss of her very self. The subtleties carry the consequences of this ultimate decision.

Peter tries to move on and get his life together but soon ends up right back where he first lost his wife... or is it where he finds her and loses himself?The story SAMANTHA is a flash fiction short story on lost love and the possibilities of the afterlife through extraterrestrial beings. Peter is the main character who misses his wife, Samantha, after a shark kills her in a gruesome attack right in front of his very eyes as they work on an underwater archaeological site. Peter tries to move on and get his life together but soon ends up right back where he first lost his wife... or is it where he finds her and loses himself?

It is the year 2060 and the biosphere of planet Earth is crumbling. Political upheaval, social unrest and environmental decay have given humanity five years of life left on Earth. Using a captured ET spacecraft, Colonel Derrick MacDonald must travel with his team to a planet forty light years from home for a chance to start over.It is the year 2060 and the biosphere of planet Earth is crumbling. Political upheaval, social unrest and environmental decay have given humanity five years of life left on Earth. Using a captured ET spacecraft, Colonel Derrick MacDonald must travel with his team to a planet forty light years from home for a chance to start over. His primary directive is to open an other worldly star gate back to Earth and allow the select few chosen for the new colony through the portal. When Colonel MacDonald reaches the new planet—Eritria—malicious centaurs attack the crew, steal the star gate, and kidnap Stephanie Brandt, the ship's doctor. Rescued by a tribe of wolf men (wolven) the Colonel's presence will fulfill an ancient prophecy foretold by tribal elders to rid the planet of the centaur's, a threat to all free people of Eritria. Can Colonel MacDonald rescue his crewmate, retrieve the star gate, aid the wolven in their war with the centaur's and reunite with his family on the other side of the galaxy?