James Farrell

"The world is ending, Forest, and the other side is shining through."The small town of Winsted and the ancient lake above it are overshadowed by a strange and deep mystery, a secret involving the very nature of reality itself. For every hundred years the Road returns to earth, and must be walked, by those whom Arheled has called. Ancient, laden with wisdom and with sorrow, the eternal guardian of the Road watches from the mountain named Temple Fell outside the town and broods over the pettiness of Men. Yet each century he must summon those who are wise, and teach them secrets that destroy the one who hears them, and at last reveal the great mystery of the heavens themselves and their true nature. But this time is not like the other times. Darkness is stirring under the earth. The Lord of Chaos is growing stronger. The Father of Dragons walks in Winsted as man, and seeds Dragon-born among the young people, and despair seeps through the world like a fog. The Powers of the North begin to gather, as the world darkens around them, and ancient foes rise out of the earth and from under the earth; foes that can only be stymied, never stopped. For the world at last is ending. Arheled knows all this, as he gazes out at the Northeast of the New World, and wonders whether he will even find any who are capable of hearing his call, and if he does, what will happen to them. For the Road is spinning out powers into the ones he calls, and the children he speaks to grow strong and fell, and stone and trees and brooks shudder at their command. So he builds, and prepares, and as he constructs on many levels of being the Five Fortresses to hold the North against the final onset of the Darkness from out of the South, he shakes his head in sorrow, for he knows it is all in vain. Strong is the Road, and stronger is its Warden, buit strongest of all is the Rider of the Darkness. In the end, the fortresses will fall, and Arheled will be smashed under the feet of the Dragons, and the Gates of the North that lie buried beneath the swampy meadow two miles north of Winsted, will be taken, and Chaos will use them to open the Gates of Hell. And when he does this, no power less that God Himself will be able to destroy him: and God, He sits in silence, and makes no sign, and it is e'en left to those below to defend as best as they may, that they may save their own souls out of the ruin of the worlds. But he will not go down without a fight. He will rouse the very trees of the earth and the hills of the North against the Rider, and the Powers of the North will be aided by the unforseen abilities of mortal Men. All this lingers in his ancient mind as he whispers in dreams and speaks eerie jesting riddles to the six young people he has selected, as a Fell Winter grips Winsted. The first three volumes comprise the Arheled trilogy, relating the vast secret that Arheled is revealing and the efforts of the Enemies to thwart this revelation being made. They may triumph in the end, but until then they will not succeed, and the Road returns to Temple Fell, and the Children walk it, and learn the secret that will give them power. The next three volumes relate the struggles between the gathering Powers of the North from many mythologies and legends, and the gathering Enemies, the Jotunn or Frost-giants, the Dragons, the Vampires, and the Nine Lords of the Night. Their struggles grow in strength and in destructive effect, causing worldwide plagues and disasters: the Plagues, in short, of the Apocalypse itself. As the world grows increasingly more dystopian and society fractures at the seams, a mysterious President takes office and founds a new religion, outlawing all others. Meanwhile the Grey Place opens, unleashing vampires to bite the living and cause by this bite a plague of despair and pain. The final volumes are yet in preparation; they will relate the Onset of the World against the Powers of the North, as the Last Battle opens.

The Knights have increased in number, and the peasantry of Marvenda own either Mage or Knight: but Galan desires to be of neither. The Mages will not tolerate free men, and so they go again to war, to exterminate their rivals the Knights, once merely part of the same Order of Marvenda.Calling up black lava, they not only destroy the Knights but Marvenda. The last Knight, Galan and a Mage go into the west to seek the Child concealed in spells who holds the key to the peace of Marvenda. But to unlock him, they will need a honeycomb of pure gold, the myrrh of the Underkeeper with which he annoints the Dead, and the Censer of the Franken which holds fire stolen from heaven.And when they obtain these, to pass the deciets of the Valley, the Dragon of Eld is compelled to send his heart before them like a star in the air. But at the end, the Father of Dragons waits, to consume the Child he has long hunted....

Supers are persecuted. Into the woods one and another of them trickle, banding together. Two of these soon acquire new members, including Robin and Charles O'Connell, of the terrible House of Fayblood. The band decides to call themselves the Sea Riders, after their old leader Sea Horse.But the other O'Connells have superpowers too, and they are in no mind to be heros or even live in peaceful hiding. They want to be supervillains. They join a gang of supers and take it over, calling themselves the Dark Riders.All across the barren basalt hills of central Connecticut the war plays out, between the Sea Riders who really just want to let things be and the Dark Riders, who never rest in the ceaseless laboring for evil. And federal agents are snooping....

The Guardians are stymied. A rogue story has erupted into reality out of fiction, and they cannot Watch it. The characters there are fictional, but have become real. And worst of all, not only can no Guardians Watch this story, an evil Guardian has entered it. In despair, the Head Guardian calls upon Clondo, the wisest of the immortal watchers of the stories, who challenged the Twelve themselves and was permitted to marry one of his characters. With the Hand of the Bean, eight fay-creatures of immense power, Clondo and his wife enter the rogue story. There the Guardian finds he can only call down cliches, and that his adversary is similarly hampered, having Plot Devices alone at his command. A battle of Cliches against Plot Devices ensues....

A mysterious wizard named Melcifer insinuates his way into the counsels of the renewed Mages, who chafe under being restricted to the ancient rules of the Order of Marvenda. The Knight distrusts him, but the Mages, and soon the King, are eating out of his hand. And then he counsels them to use dragons as a source of magic, and so deep does he hold them that Galan King shrinks not from sacrificing his own daughter.Then Melcifer tells him of a powerful King in the Valley of the West, a foe of Dragons, at the head of a new Order of Knights. Riding on dragons, Galan King lays seige to the Valley....only to find the King is the very Child he set free and who crowned him over Marvenda.Beset by dragon-lust and by old love, Galan, torn, betrays the King his old friend.

Here are gathered the three Tales of Marvenda. The first describes the restoration of the ancient Knights via the eruption of the avenging ghosts of the dead Knights to withstand an invasion of Mages.The second concerns the Orders of Mervenda, the Knights and the Mages. Sent into the west to seek three mystical keys of gold, a censer and the balm of the Underkeeper, a Knight and a Mage and a free Peasant unlock the mysterious Valley and free the Child: and there came to him Mages from the east.The third reveals the fall of the Two Orders. The King who unites them is seduced by dragon-lore and becomes a sorcerer, and the Mages swiftly fall into dragon-magic, and go with war against the grown Child, to betray him.

"A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State...."Somehow one always assumes this means that citizens should be free to own their own guns. But the new law puts an entirely different spin on this. It regulates gun owners, by making them affiliates of the police....and subject to strict control. The Greystone Hunters do not agree. They take to the woods, guns and all, in a futile publicity stunt, eluding manhunts and foreign terrorist cells, and when they succeed, they find themselves besieged by gangsters....while the feds sit by and look on. In an increasingly dystopian world, the Hunters simply cannot realize that the world they fought for has ended.