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To Dream with the Dragons (EPUB)
The Hyborean Dragons Series
A world where Dragons are slumbering gods....
Therian is a prince who inherits a dying land. Each year the sun dims in the sky and glaciers consume more of his kingdom. In early spring, birds are found dead in their nests, welded by ice to their silent young. Therian sets out to rekindle the sun, to return summer to his land. But to do so will require vast power. A single dark path lies open to him: he must dream with the Dragons and learn the sacrificial rites of sorcery. Armed with his twin ancestral blades and his growing knowledge of the dark arts, he searches the worlds for their most terrible secrets.
To Dream with the Dragons is the first story in the Hyborean Dragons Series. A Sword and Sorcery novella of Dark Fantasy.
Dear Readers, this series is Dark Fantasy, a sub-genre of Horror. In this case the hero is something of an anti-hero. There are no fuzzy-footed cute people running about--if there were, they would probably be boiled in oil by everyone else....
New: DEATH MAGIC (HAVEN SERIES #6)
Released: July 4th, 2011 at Amazon and BN
Brand struggles to deal with the tricks of the Fae, the retreat of the Kindred and the rise of the Dead. The Black Jewel awakens in DEATH MAGIC, book six of the series. Known as the Primal Jewels, the Black, the Quicksilver and the Sunstone have long been lost. This is the story of their return to the lands of Cymru.
Many old evils stir. Four score marriages between the Fae and the River Folk result in interesting offspring that have not been seen for centuries. King Arawn of the Dead schemes to raise an army to invade the River Haven. The Kindred face a mysterious plague, Myrrdin is nowhere to be found and Oberon is up to something….
The Haven Series
The Haven series is the story of the nine Jewels of power, each representing a different form of magic. The Red Jewel, Sang, gives the power over Blood Magic. The Blue, Lavatis, can call the Rainbow and rules the Sky.
Amber Magic is the first book in this epic series of fantasy novels.
The Inside Story of the Haven Series:
I wanted a chance to answer all the questions I’m getting about the series from emails and online boards all at once. I’ll try to avoid any spoilers, as many of you might not be finished reading the books. There won’t be any “What do you mean he’s Luke’s Dad??” story-ruining moments, so read on.
The original conception point for the series goes back to the nineties, when I worked for AT&T in England. Based out of Birmingham, I did a lot of driving about in those days for both work and pleasure. Cornwall and Wales were handy, and I visited them as often as I could for work or on holidays. I became fascinated during my travels by the fairy legends and Celtic beliefs of the western UK and bought a number of books on the topic. I’m the only person I know who has studied the real original tales, such as the welsh Mabinogion (although I’m sure there are plenty of others out there who have!)
Earlier in life, I’d had a love affair with the works of Tolkien, as I’m sure most fantasy readers have. In fact, I reread the entire series for the second time over eleven days at age eleven (that seemed significant to me at the time). While working in the UK I noticed, as I’m sure other Americans must have, that many of the quaint elements of the Tolkien books were easily sourced in England. Many of the place names and character names were easily locatable, and far from fanciful in Britain. Imagine my surprise, for example, upon learning that “Shire” was a common word that simply meant: “a county that’s not part of a city”. The more I learned about the real folklore upon which LotR was based, I came to realize that later works often lacked his depth of world-feel due to being based upon other people’s fantasy worlds, rather than the original millennia-old tales. The genre had become, in my opinion, rather inbred and stale. As the century ended, things grew worse for originality. I found many things had become “generic” by the 2000s. Dwarves always sounded like Scotsmen. Elves were foppish, snooty people with long ears and long hair, etc. Legion were the games, movies and books that derived their creative vision from one another.
I decided to write a series that was different than all the others. Instead of “ripping off” old JRRT one more time, I felt determined to build a world that was based upon the original source material, i. e. from the old pagan beliefs of the Celtic peoples. In that way, my book would be a different vision than JRRT’s, but based upon the same blueprint, if you will. I found this decision to be incredibly liberating. I was no longer constricted by what had gone before. I was free to “fix” anything I found upsetting about the genre as it stood, and yet I still had a basis on which to stand that made the world feel like a coherent whole. Publishing in the Ebook format gave me even more freedom to experiment with the new medium.
Where to start fixing things? Several elements of my beloved LotR series had always annoyed me. One of them was the magic system, which seemed to consist of a lot of talk and very little action. Oh sure, we were told what a scary guy Gandalf was every chapter or so, but he mostly made fireworks and blew smoke-rings into fanciful shapes for two books running. Worse, everyone had a magic ring, (there were nineteen in all), but no one ever actually used them to do anything, except for the hapless halflings who tended to accidently slip one on now and then. Just what did those seven dwarf rings do for the dwarves? Which dwarves had them? Why did Gandalf rate ownership of an elf ring, when he wasn’t even a card-carrying elf? These questions drove a serious fan to distraction. When I came up with the magic system of the Haven series, I made sure there were very few items of great magical power, but if you read the books, you’ll not find yourself disappointed. The Jewels are used often and decisively!
Another major point I disliked about middle-earth was the doomed nature of it. I didn’t want to hear how the elves were fading into the west. I didn’t want to know dragons were few and far between. Who falls in love with a fantasy world and then wants to hear that all the cool stuff is dying out? In the world of the Haven, the humans are rare and endangered. Everyone outnumbers them, and there are plenty of other races trotting about. Far from being faded and distant and declining, these aliens are dangerous and vibrant. They strive with one another continually, and most of the struggles revolve around their possession of the Nine Jewels.
The last and possibly most significant irritation didn’t come from JRRT himself, but rather his countless knock-offs. That irritation was the slow humanization of every race in every story. It’s gotten so bad in some of the more recent fantasies they often don’t even bother have other races at all. Everyone is a flavor of human, usually one that is easily recognizable as a "Mongol of the Steppes" or a "Viking of the Fjords", etc. This removal of a critical element to fantasy writing I completely rejected, considering it sheer laziness on the part of the writer. (Why go to the trouble of inventing a people and a culture, when you can simply lift one off an old earth nation?) I decided to go in the opposite direction, true to the nature of the original fairy tales, where elves and goblins bordered upon nightmarish madness. Just read a few real fairy tales online, if you want to see what I mean. My fantasy races are not just humans with accents and attitudes. They are, as best I could make them, alien in thought and action.
-BVL
