It’s HERE! At last, the first installment of the Fire-Rider saga has hit Amazon!
It’s taken awhile, what with the medical adventures and the project involved in learning how to navigate Kindle while setting up new imprints for The Copyeditor’s Desk. Fire-Rider is published under the Plain & Simple Press imprint, which will be reserved for nonfiction books and for fiction that is not primarily erotic in nature. Camptown Races Press will publish the erotica. 😉
FireRider takes place 1900 years after the fall of the Mercan Empire and the near extinction of the Old Ones. A period of global warming flooded coastal cities and island nations, spread havoc and famine, and culminated in a series of global pandemics. The result was a world-wide population collapse that left too few educated workers to run the power plants, mines, oil refineries, and transportation infrastructure needed to sustain civilization. A swift climatic reversal gave way to a harsh ice age and foreclosed any possibility of reviving the human race’s former technological glory.
The survivors live during a postliterate, post-industrial, post-technological dark age that will come to be known as the Great Lacuna. Rival Espanyo and Hengliss cultures survive in agrarian, feudalistic cultures loyal only to local warlords and overlords. Chronic warfare defines their world.
The stories related in the books of Kaybrel Fire-Rider, Kubna (“warlord”) of Moor Lek, were gathered during his time by the wandering scholar Hapa Cottrite, one of the rare literate men of the Great Lacuna. Some 3700 years later, a crew of herders found a cache of crumbling documents hidden in a cave where they had taken shelter from a storm. These were the remains of the Cottrite Codex, a collection of arcana and journal entries penned by Cottrite himself. The Fire-Rider epic is a fragment of that invaluable trove, translated and narrated by the famed storyteller Estabanya Estabanya Marcanda do Tilár i Robintál do Nomanto Berdo of the Methgoan Academy of Written and Oral Performance.
A Gift for the Kubna joins the allied raiding parties of Okan and A’o before the burning city of Roksan, a major Espanyo stronghold that the Hengliss allies have defeated and sacked. It tells the story of how Kaybrel, the powerful and dangerous governor of an Okan province called Moor Lek, came into possession of the orphaned Tavio Ombertín and why he decided to take the youth under his protection.
Cover art was designed by Arizona artist Gary Bennett.
