Fantasy NOVEL
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The City is in near perpetual darkness. Light brings out scary creatures from the forest that surrounds them, and those creatures are a product of the war that raged when the Towers were merely Watch Towers. The Old Gods instilled peace, and the Towers became beacons to ensure that peace stayed.
In the North Tower, in this City of Unity - once called Kombayn when the Old Gods walked amongst their creations - is the boy named Fuscus Praefuscus, though people call him Kid. His Father, Praefuscus XVII, is Lord of the North Tower and therefore Ruler over the City. Some would call Kid the Broken Boy, because when he was an infant, he had fallen out of a window in the North Tower, and somehow lived. He grew up, however, with scars all over one side of his face and a leg that hasn't completely grown correctly.
His Father tells Kid he is to take over the role his Brother, Muet, was meant to have, of Chief Advisor to his older Brother, Rapio, upon his succession. But Kid is the Third Son, and is not expected to do anything, for the rest of his life. Yet Kid is sent to the South Tower, where he is to begin training under the Apprentice Program. The four Towers contain complicated and symbiotic machines that are connected to each other, and function as long as they are maintained, it being the task of the Apprentices to learn how, to ensure the City will continue to function.
But Kid is destined for more. He receives help along the way from some seemingly ordinary people, with just the right kind of tale to tell. But first of all, Kid has to make it through the Program, even while his nemesis, the Son of the Lord of the South Tower, makes his time there a living hell.
The book explores theology, of mono versus pantheon theology, and how progress is new and young while tradition is old and dying. It pays homage to Swedish, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and other Germanic types of mythology, while presenting conflict coming from within - internal, mental, the self - in that we first must learn to conquer ourselves, before we can hope to aid others, and that words can hurt, and inflict wounds unseen - which then becomes a battle with the self to prevent those words causing immovable, permanent scars, and that sometimes, we bring it upon ourselves - that the worst creatures are those we create in our own heads - so that the culprit of the word has already gone and is immaterial to the damage the word is now doing.
Rather than a constant search for conflict and resolution, there is a constant search for the return to peace, because conflict is an anomaly to established reality, or normality.
This is Book One of a proposed quadrilogy to present the absolute growth of one character from childhood to adulthood, and what he makes of himself, with the help of those he meets on the way.
This is NOT a children’s book, though it does contain a child as its principle character.
