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Remember all that hype
about Y2K? Imagine how much worse it was the last
time around….
It is the final weeks of the year
999 A.D., and the world is about to end.
Anglo-Saxon Britain is beset with
rumors of anarchy, chaos, the devil about to rise up
and take over with the turning of the millennium.
The lord of one of the most remote
and fertile lands of all has been said to run mad—releasing
his peasants, his livestock, and letting the fields
turn fallow. The Lord of Alderich, it is said, is preparing
for the end of everything.
But Alderich and all it holds are
to fall to another man at the end of this century: Rafael
of Leonhart, a feared and famed mercenary, leader of
a family which has long awaited this very year to inherit
the land they claim should have been theirs ages ago.
Rafael has come home again from years
of wandering to find the world turned upside-down: people
fleeing to the woods, animals roaming free, and Jozua
Rune, Lord of Alderich for just a few more days, locked
firmly away in his family castle, methodically destroying
all that Rafael has come to take.
Rafe sees only one possible hope for
preventing the war that is about to ensue: Serath Rune,
granddaughter of Jozua.
Serath has spent much of her life
imprisoned behind convent walls. She is the living image
of her dead mother—burned
for witchcraft when Serath was just a child—and
the likeness she bears to her stains her life. It is
whispered she is enchanted, bespelled, cursed. Yet she
is a young woman of intelligence and deep convictions,
someone who isn't going to allow the end of the world
to stop her from getting what she wants—and
certainly not a man. Not even the man who means to take
control of Alderich, and thwart her grandfather at any
cost.
Against the backdrop of the coming
millennium, one man and one woman stand opposed and
then together, fighting the turmoil and desperation
raging around them. The end of the century draws closer
and closer—will Serath
and Rafael discover their love for each other before
the very end of time?
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