Part of Series
The fragments of the Key begin to surface... After saving the woman he loves from the dark sorcerers of Ankhara, Fen realizes for the first time that his power can be a force for good. But the power is wild and uncontrollable and he doesn't have long before it devours him as it did his father. His only hope is to summon one of the ancient Shapers and convince it to teach him what he needs to know. Aislin has kept the secret of the strange artifact she found in the alien underground vault. But her secret is not as safe as it seems. The agents of the Devourers know what she has found and they will threaten everyone she loves if she doesn't give it to them. The Guardian Kasai has created new, more powerful warriors to threaten Karliss and his clan. As powerful as Karliss is, he knows he will inevitably lose to Kasai. Seeing no other options, he conceives a desperate plan to retrieve the lost words of power, but their origins are shrouded in legend and to track them down he and his companions will have to complete a dangerous quest.
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.
