Books

In the Valley of the Oaks, seventy-two young women are chosen as Princesses. Every Friday at sunset they sing to the Great Oak. Their voices are the only thing standing between the valley and the Vanishers, who come on the winds twice a year and take whatever they please. A clock. A child. A husband. Whatever will break you.

Hawthorne Arden has been a Princess for four years. Then the Vanishers take her song voice, and she's known all along what that valley does to those the song cannot protect.

There is one way back. The women on the mountain can undo a vanishing. But that comes at a price. Hawthorne agrees to pay it before she even knows what it is, and she means to carry it out believing, to the last moment, that she is the one in the right.

Until that moment comes, when a stranger stops her hand. What waits for her on the other side of that night is not the punishment she was promised, but a King she was raised to fear, a soldier who will not let her go, and a desert where no thirst is ever quenched.

Songless: The Desert is the first book in the Songless Saga. It is a frontier fantasy about exile and forgiveness, written for readers who prefer their heroines guilty and their mercy unearned.

In the high reaches of the Gold Mountains, disgraced lieutenant and King's Key Jack Marshall retreats to his family's crumbling ranch to outrun a scandal and rebuild — board by board, season by season — the house that will one day hold a legacy. A tale of repentance, honor, and divine restoration: a life surrendered to the King becomes the strongest house of all.

It takes place before The Desert and can be read before or after it.

Here is a world under judgement. Here is a soul being watched. Here is a myth.

Jack and Hannah Marshall awake unsettled. Now within the walls of Fort Bethel, they have survived the Desert. But the Desert never gives up. If it cannot have them in daylight, it will have them in dreams.

The saga continues as a redeemed soul learns the cost of redemption.

Why Relics? They remind us of tradition; they point us toward wisdom; they illuminate the truth. The range is wide, offering both Science Fiction and Fantasy. But Indie writers don’t stick to one genre. We meld them. Enter a mythic West, 1929 Chicago, a war-torn Italian town, a conclave built from ruins. Explore the Sinai, the North Sea, a colony in need of clean water, a glacier at the end of the world, a rogue planet. Find a relic on Mars, a crypt, a door in a mountain, a way out, or one covered by time. And like all relics, they survived for a reason.

A Songless short story, The Tarnished Key, is included. It tells the story of Dr. Nora Salarus. She runs the final medical simulation of the term, and the scenario is never a drill. Five tarnished relics sit open on the table, each one a door to a real emergency in a real past. She hands her favorite student the tarnished key, thinking she is the one teaching the lesson.

It was a joy assembling this anthology. We were overwhelmed with submissions from many solid writers, allowing us to put together a first-rate collection of Indie talent. We remain grateful to Hans G. Schantz, who blessed the project and allowed us to attach it to his brainchild—A Based Book Sale. This is the reader’s chance to meet them in their native habitat—the story.

Much to our delight, the relic concept proved such fertile ground that we received more stories than we could print in one book.