Author(s): D Power

Novel

Let me for you describe a world that knoweth no light

A fairytale world within the midst of this world of diminishing light, where

Reality crumbles and time is rotten, the church of the saints lie dead, forgotten

And rumors of Endwar with heathens of northern domains are filling the night:

Let me for you reveal the path of an beast-child fair,

A childe so wrong, yet forced to belong in this world that he could not bear,

Take heart, for you will not be alone - take ear, percieve the whipsers of Home

And bring them word of grandfather's death, retrieve your book and follow it there...

Welcome Home is the first in a grimdark fantasy trilogy, centering (mostly) around the exploits of Rygnir Wyndfallen, a beast-child drawn on by a self-imposed doom to places his tiny life has never been.  The world collapses into undead ruin around him and even time cannot uphold itself; it is an apocalyptican fairytale indeed.

Aelfric, an ageing lumberjack trained in the illegal art of charcoal-burning, stumbles on a fight between several fenrians, sorcerous wolf-like anthropoids.  The object of their fighting, a baby's basket, falls into the charcoal-burner's hands and he takes the child within to raise as his own.  Rygnir, as he names the child, is exposed to the horrors of a dying world despite his "grandfather's" reclusive lifestyle, and after witnessing the death of one he realized to be more important to the world at large than he once knew, decides to set out and find the one "Wingdale" of which Aelfric spoke.

Welcome Home follows Rygnir as he leaves the claustrophobic confines of Boar's Wood and travels east with a series of (hopefully!) interesting characters; it introduces us to the world he lives in and the friends he makes along the way, and follows him down through the Witches' Thoroughfare deep below the Fimbulforn, to where his resolve and faith will be strained to the uttermost end.