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With a few books wading through the publisher’s queue, I’ve started my next fantasy novel, titled The Bone Wall.

What possessed me (literally) to pen this dark tale is a mystery to me. I’m a nice person. A mom, granny, volunteer, and past-mental health counselor who worked with grieving children. I baby my pets, cherish my hubby, and haven’t a violent bone in my body. I get teary at the occasional TV commercial and that’s pretty darn maudlin if you ask me.

Yet as an author of works of fantasy, I travel often down the road of “what if.” Sometimes that journey is light-hearted and happily-ending, and other times, when the news of the day makes me fear for our world, the path I wander is much darker. This is one of those grim trails.

The human journey through time is sunbathed and shadowed with remarkable advancements, some clouded with secret and not-so-secret costs. What if we continue to poison our land, water and air in the name of progress and profit? What if we continue to blast our way through conflicts on a global and personal scale? What if we abandon compassion, no longer our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers? What becomes of us when righteousness is blind?

This book is a work of fantasy in a world without vision or concern for consequence. A broken world.

Amazon

The Bone Wall – Prolog

My sister stands by her window in the moonlight, the only light in the stone chamber. Carved of alabaster, she’s a statue whittled by a master’s artful hand, naked skin pale, shadowed, wraithlike in its translucence. Her hair gathers moonbeams, corn-silk draped over shoulder-bones, free of the blood staining her face and hands. Gray eyes honed with steel study a landscape of gnarled trees, skeletal limbs clawing with broken fingers from a dead land. All around her the world dies. She is blind to the fragile greenness of new leaves.

Her clothes lie in a heap on the floor, the reek of battle, sweat, and blood thick in the folds, threads of terror woven into the very fabric. She will dream in blood, wear those clothes without respite, glory in the gore of shredded flesh. My sister is demon-born, exquisite in her purity, and Death’s Devil has his grips on her.

I am her twin, one and the same, and this is her story.

My tale begins in Heaven…