No ordinary person can control the elemental powers of Stone, Sea, and Sky. But these three are far from ordinary. Fen loses everything when his city is sacked by invaders. Orphaned and alone, he forms a strange bond with the city’s new ruler. He starts to carve out a life for himself, only to discover a strange power is awakening within him. The same power that killed his father. Aislin came from the sea, her origins a mystery. Like the sea, she is wild, unpredictable, and powerful. Feared and hated by the other children, she is bullied by them, until the day comes when she turns her power on them. Karliss is in training to become the next wind shaman for his tribe. Reckless and irresponsible, he uses his power for his own amusement, ignoring the warnings of his mentor. And then one day tragedy strikes the tribe, and he must shoulder a great responsibility he is not ready for. The Dragon Queen makes her presence felt once again and all the land is in peril. Can Fen, Aislin, and Karliss overcome their own fears and master their power, or will the world fall to Chaos? ( Chaos and Retribution is the second series in the Chaos Cycle, following Immortality and Chaos (I) and before The Dragon Queen of Chaos (III).)
Author
Born in 1965, I grew up on a working cattle ranch in the desert thirty miles from Wickenburg, Arizona, which at that time was exactly the middle of nowhere. Work, cactus and heat were plentiful, forms of recreation were not. The TV got two channels when it wanted to, and only in the evening after someone hand cranked the balky diesel generator to life. All of which meant that my primary form of escape was reading. At 18 I fled to Tucson where I attended the University of Arizona. A number of fruitless attempts at productive majors followed, none of which stuck. Discovering I liked writing, I tried journalism two separate times, but had to drop it when I realized that I had no intention of conducting interviews with actual people but preferred simply making them up. After graduating with a degree in Creative Writing in 1989, I backpacked Europe with a friend and caught the travel bug. With no meaningful job prospects, I hitchhiked around the U.S. for a while then went back to school to learn to be a high school English teacher. I got a teaching job right out of school in the middle of the year. The job lasted exactly one semester, or until I received my summer pay and realized I actually had money to continue backpacking. The next stop was Australia, where I hoped to spend six months, working wherever I could, then a few months in New Zealand and the South Pacific. However, my plans changed irrevocably when I met a lovely Swiss woman, Claudia, in Alice Springs. Undoubtedly swept away by my lack of a job or real future, she agreed to allow me to follow her back to Switzerland where, a few months later, she gave up her job to continue traveling with me. Over the next couple years we backpacked the U.S., Eastern Europe and Australia/New Zealand, before marrying and settling in the mountains of Colorado, in a small town called Salida. In Colorado we starved and froze, started our own electronics business, and had a couple of sons, Dylan and Daniel. In 2005 we shut the business down and moved back to Tucson. I am currently working on finishing The Devastation Wars fantasy series and attending graduate school.
