Beyond Good & Evil: The Galanor Saga - Volume I

This is the first work in a trilogy of heroic fantasy. Galanor walks a path well-trod by such notables as Odysseus, Gilgamesh and Roland. It is the way of the disenfranchised, the obsessed and the heroic. It is lonely. It is demanding. It is eternal. The following, we hope, will give you some idea of what to expect from this tale, crafted in poetic prose. We hope you will enjoy it: Welcome. My name, though it matters not to the telling of these tales, is Aficiados. I am, by virtue of birth and heritage. A master chronicler. As such, I have been called upon to relate these tales of honor and courage. They are tales which have yet to be concluded, though they began when the world was very young. It was a time when all things seemed possible. It time when sinister powers stirred the pool of human sloth so as to shape and own the destinies of men. It was a time of legend and myth, when good and evil were not just random and ever-changing points on a societal compass gone mad. It is of this time, and of its mightiest hero, that these tales will tell. Mark them well, my friend, for I shall relate them to you, as they were given to me, and to my father before me, and to his father before him, and beyond that unto the dawn of my line (which has its roots in the dust - shrouded soils of antiquity). Mark them well, for these are the histories of he who was known as: Galanor. Let us begin ... It came to pass, that in the final days of the Age of Mardock, a great plague swept across the face of Atlantis. It was not a malignancy of the body, but rather, one of the spirit. No one was immune. Noble scholars, who had once been masters of profound and enlightened study, became the tainted and perverse slaves to a relentless obsession with the malignant and arcane. Once lofty priests, abandoned the pursuits of their fathers, as they hurled their spirits headlong into the compelling vortex wherein dwell the taunting mysteries of Dark and Light. Countless centuries of progress and sanity yielded to this over-whelming corruption, until, in the end, all that remained was a festering pool of corruption. Such was its virility, that the cancer oozed, not only into every pore of the Atlantean societal organism, but, outward to the virgin globe. The world lay in a shallow, hopeless psychic grave, awaiting, though it knew it not, an avatar of Light. It has been written, that the Lords of Light are more subtle and devious than those of Darkness. For, corruption is an ebony cloak that can be worn with naught but a gesture. It requires little, and promises much. Richeousness, perhaps because it is not native to our beings, is not so easily won, nor championed. Galanor had been chosen, without consent or regard, to be that champion. He was to be a champion whose destiny, and, indeed, whose very soul, had been set upon a road without end, in pursuit of a goal without resolution, by powers he would never know, nor comprehend. He had been chosen and doomed, by the Lords of Light to defend their cause, without surcease, till the fabric of time lay unwoven and exposed to the relentless winds of the eternal.