In this second book, Guardians of the Realms; The Blood of the Fathers, the Magicians, Askah and Willow Lexus are called on to utilize all of their strengths and abilities to destroy a dark, evil entity that is spreading death, terror and chaos across all of the known realms. They and their friends are called to the Old World of their ancestors to battle a vicious, tyrant from the Realm of Ends that has driven those left alive to the brink of extinction. Once in the Old World, they face unimaginable dangers. Mystics, warlocks, and witches haunt the mountains, along with blood thirsty beasts that seem to see everything as a meal. Ghosts of the past threaten to separate Willow from Askah forever. But who is the real enemy? Mystery and terror lies around every corner. Twists and turns keep the reader on edge as the team makes their way across the devastated Old World looking for the enemy. A wicked storm tears the team apart, sending many of them to find their way back to the others after being pulled into the depths of the Old World caves. Willow hears the voices of the ancients, but are they really the ghosts of those who lived over a thousand years ago? Are they really guiding her in the right direction? And why is the Keeper of the Gates to Hell asking for their help? The battle spills over into Earth's Realm, and their old friends are again there to help them in their fight against evil. Will their losses be too much to bear this time? Is their magic going to be enough?
Now UPDATED with even more bonus material, this surely has to be the ULTIMATE Dickens eBook, with over 1,600 illustrations. In this colossal edition you will discover every novel, short story, novella, play, poem, letter, speech and article written by Charles Dickens. This really is the COMPLETE Dickens. (70MB Version 11) * ALL 15 Novels and ALL illustrated with the original Victorian images * Each text is annotated with concise introductions, giving valuable contextual information * each novel and story collection has its own contents table * Special Bonus text of Henry Morford’s classic continuation of Edwin Drood – finish the novel at last! * all of the Christmas stories and novellas with their original artwork * the complete poetry, plays, letters and speeches * ALL of the collaborative works with other authors – even the very rare ones * beautifully illustrated with hundreds of Dickensian images * rare images of how the monthly serials first appeared, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts * includes bonus Pickwickiana text – Montcrieff’s drama SAM WELLER, giving a taste of the Victorian craze – available nowhere else as a digital book * includes John Forster's biography of Dickens; explore the great writer's amazing life! * features MEMOIRS OF JOSEPH GRIMALDI by Thomas Egerton Wilks, which Dickens edited in his early career - first time in digital print. * includes no less than FIVE more biographies, including Mamie Dickens’ memoir MY FATHER AS I RECALL HIM * boasts a special criticism section, with essays by writers such as Virginia Woolf, G.K. Chesterton, Andrew Lang and Henry James, examining Dickens’ contribution to literature * includes an Adaptations section, featuring Hallie Erminie Rives’ TALES FROM DICKENS and rare theatrical adaptations of the novels * UPDATED with larger images - enjoy the original illustrations in detail! * this truly is the Dickensian’s perfect eBook! Please visit www.delphiclassics.com for the full detailed list and to browse our range of exciting classic titles CONTENTS: A DINNER AT POPLAR WALK The Novels ALL THE NOVELS JOHN JASPER’S SECRET BY HENRY MORFORD The Christmas Novellas A CHRISTMAS CAROL THE CHIMES THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH THE BATTLE OF LIFE THE HAUNTED MAN AND THE GHOST’S BARGAIN The Short Stories LIST OF SHORT STORIES The Short Story Collections SKETCHES BY BOZ ORIGINAL PUBLISHED ORDER OF THE SKETCHES MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK REPRINTED PIECES The Collaborative Works ALLTHE COLLABORATIVE WORKS The Plays THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN THE VILLAGE COQUETTES IS SHE HIS WIFE? OR, SOMETHING SINGULAR! THE LAMPLIGHTER MR. NIGHTINGALE’S DIARY THE FROZEN DEEP NO THOROUGHFARE The Poetry LIST OF THE POETRY The Non-Fiction AMERICAN NOTES PICTURES FROM ITALY THE LIFE OF OUR LORD A CHILD’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER THE COMPLETE SPEECHES THE COMPLETE LETTERS MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS and many more The Adaptations TALES FROM DICKENS BY HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES and more The Criticism MANY ESSAYS BY FAMOUS WRITERS AND CRITICS The Biographies THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS BY JOHN FORSTER DICKENS BY SIR ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS BY SIR FRANK T. MARZIALS VICTORIAN WORTHIES: CHARLES DICKENS BY G.H. BLORE DICKENS' LONDON BY M. F. MANSFIELD MY FATHER AS I RECALL HIM BY MAMIE DICKENS
Women are at risk in this Society! The US government has determined that personal responsibility is the model for retirement. Each retiree will need to MANAGE all the components of her retirement investments, health care costs, personal care costs and living arrangements for an estimated 30 year retirement. All the while the government will continue to lessen Social Security and Medicare coverage for the middle class. A married Woman may spend 15 years or more without a partner typically after suffering financially from the crushing long term care costs for their aging spouse. Without proper planning, a woman will surely be thrown into poverty. And when a woman starts to need care, many women will find that their adult children or family are not in a place financially or geographically to assist. Society has shifted tremendous responsibility onto women without creating the tools or assistance needed to be successful. Women have been Ignored! The retirement planning industry was created by men for men. The industry is selling "the get rich quick" gambling on stocks illusion as a complete retirement plan. This is a ridiculous strategy! It is attractive to men that want quick fixes to complicated issues while Wall Street drains your portfolio through commissions and fees. Women will need to manage all the aspects of retirement in this challenging society, watching expenses as much as their investments. IN THIS NEW RETIREMENT, WOMEN MUST ACCEPT THE LEADING ROLE. WOMEN ARE NATURAL MANAGERS. THEY MANAGE THEIR FAMILY'S FINANCES, RELATIONSHIPS AND A HOUSEHOLD. Out of necessity eighty percent of women will find themselves solely responsible at some point in retirement.
"You see, Edward, editor and budding Grail Knight, you're part of the Merlin myth, and you have been for a long time," said Merlin enigmatically. The figure of Merlin, magician, enchanter, trickster, strategist of King Arthur's Camelot, wise old man of Celtic myth, has intrigued and enthralled readers for centuries, but who, really, was he? Did he ever actually exist? Boston editor Edward Burbage is given a unique opportunity to find out. He's invited to Merlin's home on Mertowney Mountain to interview him. The invitation includes free transportation, and Merlin's mountain is not in this world, and for that matter, how on Earth could Burbage be talking to Merlin anyway? Merlin is supposed to be only a character from an old myth, isn't he? Over the course of five years, starting in 2034, Burbage conducts his interviews, and the revelations Merlin makes are astounding. He has been many mythic figures, taken on many guises, such as the Irish Cuchulainn, the Egyptian Anubis, the Navaho Monster Slayer, the Greek Herakles, the Polynesian Maui, and even a few holy men like Saint Columba of Iona and John the Evangelist of Patmos, author of Revelation. He's worked as initiator, war-god, slayer of inimical spirits, prophet, seer, a guide to the soul in the after-life, geomancer, terraformer, a fisher up of islands, and especially a devoted field agent to the Great Mother, Herself operating under many guises such as Morrigan, Isis, Changing Woman, and Hera. But why has Edward Burbage been brought to Mertowney Mountain? It's not just so Merlin can tell his true story. Merlin has a plan for him, and he's preparing things all the time he's recounting his exploits. Edward Burbage has a key role to play in the next installment of the long life of Merlin. He's about to step onto the world stage of myth disclosing a long withheld mystery, the secret of the Mer-Line, the truth and power behind Merlin himself.
It is 2037, and the Darkness and its army have invaded the world of Rylaxon and its six moons. The Vampeer population subjugates humanity, feeding on the helpless population and turning unwilling citizens into soldiers. Ten-year-old Biron Coomra, a child created by a biophysicist from Rylaxon and a powerful witch from a distant alien world planet called Earth, is living on Eda, the still-peaceful fifth moon. Although he has lost his magical abilities, he still has numerous gifts that make him a formidable enemy of evil--and he is connected to the Triune, a powerful deity who sometimes speaks through him. Biron and his friends--the Warriors of Eda--are summoned to save a select group, the Chosen, and bring them to this safe haven. Meanwhile, Gorgos, the leader of the Vampeer forces and Birons archnemesis, leads his troops to destroy Birons birth city and force a showdown, and the queen of a race of inhuman hunters, the Vorax, has her sights set on the boy as well. The warriors must rescue the Chosen and raise an army before time runs out. In this novel, the third in a series, a boy with unique powers faces enemies on multiple fronts as he and his friends seek to bring the chosen to Eda and protect their world from Darkness.
The six volumes of the Ysstrhm series are works of high fantasy and the world that they presuppose is not ours. Its a world that includes magic, distinctive customs, and flora and fauna that resemble ours only in respect to the presence of humans, cats, canines, and bees. There are, for example, no horses that may be ridden into battle. But there are battles in the story that is told, as well as suspense, mystery, quests, losses, love, and sex. In the present volume the maps and explanatory appendices that were scattered among the six volumes are gathered together with some revisions and a few items of additional material. It provides doors into the unique world of Ysstrhm.
The principal source for Russian folk-tales is the great collection of Afanáśev, a coeval of Rybnikov, Kirěyevski, Sakharov, Bezsonov, and others who all from about 1850 to 1870 laboriously took down from the lips of the peasants of all parts of Russia what they could of the endless store of traditional song, ballad, and folk-tale. These great collectors were actuated only by the desire for accuracy; they appended laboriously erudite notes; but they were not literary men and did not sophisticate, or improve on their material. But, before venturing on a brief account of the tales, something must be premised as to the position occupied by folk-tales in the cultural development of a people. In Pagan times, there always existed a double religion, the ceremonial worship of the gods of nature and the tribal deities,—a realm of thought in which all current philosophy and idealism entered into a set form that symbolized the State,—and also local cults and superstitions, the adoration of the spirits of streams, wells, hills, etc. To all Aryan peoples, Nature has always been alive, but never universalized, or romanticized, as in modern days; wherever you were, the brook, the wind, the knoll, the stream were all inhabited by agencies, which could be propitiated, cajoled, threatened, but, under all conditions, were personal forces, who could not be disregarded. When Christianity transformed the face of the world, it necessarily left much below the surface unaffected. The great national divinities were proscribed and submerged; some of their features reappearing in the legendary feats of the saints. The local cults continued, with this difference, that they were now condemned by the Church and became clandestine magic; or else they were adopted by the Church, and the rites and sanctuaries transferred. The memory of them subsisted; the fear of these local gods degenerated into superstition; the magic of the folk-tales becomes half-fantastic, half-conventional, belief in which is surreptitious, usual, and optional. At this stage of disorganization of local custom, folk-tales arise, and into them, transmitted as they are orally and under the ban of the Church, contaminations of all sorts creep, such as mistaken etymologies, faint memories of real history, reminiscences of lost folk-songs, Christian legend and morals, etc. The Russian people have handed down three categories of records. First of all, the Chronicles, which are very full, very accurate, and, within the limits of the temporary concepts of possibility and science, absolutely true. Secondly, the ballads or bylíny; epic songs in an ancient metre, narrating historical episodes as they occur; and also comprising a cycle of heroic romance, comparable with the chansons de geste of Charlemagne, the cycles of Finn and Cuchúlain of the Irish, and possibly with the little minor epics out of which it is supposed that some supreme Greek genius built up the artistic epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey. These bylíny may be ranked as fiction: i.e. as facts of real life (as then understood), applied to non-existent, unvouched, or legendary individuals. They are not bare records of fact, like the Chronicles; imagination enters into their scope; non-human, miraculous incidents are allowable; their content is not a matter for faith or factual record; they may be called historical fiction, which, broadly taken, corresponded to actual events, and typified the national strivings and ideals. The traditional ceremonial songs, magical incantations and popular melodies are of the same date and in the same style.
