The Realm
The Blue Lands took their name from the glowing bedrock that underlies their hilly landscape. For thousands of years, it brought bountiful harvests, and people lived in peace and harmony. But one day, plague visited the shores of the Blue Lands, and many died. Physicians discovered that large outcrops of bluestone could save lives, but as winter came on, people died as much from the cold as the plague.
A great WIZARDESS set to work and devised a way to embed glowing bluestones in the bone over the heart. The process killed some, but the thousands who survived, known as THE BLUEHEART, also prospered with long life, good health, and contentment.
The melding of stone with bone had created a hybrid power. The wizardess, who in dire cases, embedded more than one stone, discovered that they sometimes conferred magical abilities, such as mind-reading and healing. The descendants of such persons could tolerate an even greater number of stones, and she could grow their magic exponentially.
When the aggressive SILVER PEOPLES threatened to invade the land of The Blueheart, the elders begged the wizardess to create powerful enough beings to thwart them. With a brave volunteer, she created a race called The Maidens, led by THE BLUE MAIDEN OF PEACE, a woman whose heart glowed with thirty stones, while her sixteen lieutenants each carried ten stones at their core. Together, these protectors drove away the Silver Peoples and protected the Blueheart for many years.
But the Silver were an ambitious people, whose sorcerers worked tirelessly to learn the secrets of The Maidens. Eventually, these cunning men fashioned strange serpents to incapacitate them and devised a way to siphon off the magic for their own twisted ends. They killed or drove out as many Blueheart as they could and oppressed those peoples left behind. The Blue Maiden and her confederates fell into legend and myth, and the people suffered under their Silver masters without hope.
The Chronicle of the Blueheart
Book 1: The Blue Maiden Wakens
A battle-hardened soldier named GWAR MEENST is sent to the Great Massif fortress to guard a prisoner who languishes in a poisoned pool, constrained by a serpent. At first, Gwar is content with his duties. But as the light shifts with the seasons, he sees his prisoner clearly for the first time—and falls in love. Pressing the captain of the guards, he learns she is THE BLUE MAIDEN OF PEACE, a supposedly mythical being who in ancient times used her fiery powers to bring justice to the war-torn Blue Lands. But when Gwar tries to engineer her escape, he is captured and sentenced to death. The Captain, regretting his role in imprisoning her, fakes an execution and smuggles Gwar out of the fortress, urging him to find The Blueheart and to tell them their protector lives.
Gwar makes his way north, joining forces with the exiled Blue Court, hidden away in a mountainous region where they struggle to exist. They hatch a plan to get neutralize the serpent who is holding The Maiden prisoner. But to revive her, Gwar must be implanted with numerous bluestones—an operation he may not survive—and then they must find and free the other Maidens and begin the task of freeing the Blue Lands from their oppressors.
(First in a series)