Foreword

This novel length story occurs in the same world and series as my much earlier story "The Not So Green Hills of Home", but it is absolutely and completely unnecessary to read that story first and in fact I would suggest that you don't. This story is technically the first (and earliest) story of the series chronologically, and it will provide a more than adequate introduction to this fantasy world.

This particular story has been sitting in my ideas folder for three or four years, but it was only after I started writing 'Green Hills' that the final pieces of the this tale came together in my head and I realized I was envisioning another but rather different story in that same world. This did simplify things, until I realized later on once I slapped the world chronology into a rough sort of order that rather than this being a 'sequel' of sorts, this story was instead a much earlier prequel ... with 'Green Hills' actually falling down into about sixth or seventh place in my revised story sequence. In other words, with my usual erratic organization, I'd nearly started to write the entire series in backwards reverse order!