Chapter 1

My head stopped swimming and my eyes came into focus. I attempted to open my eyes wider against the painful glare of the sun but was forced to squint. The cliff in front of me rose with angled ribs of white chalky stone; loose rubble huddled between the lines of stone. The sounds of spring were all around me and as my head turned from side to side I realized I had no clue where the hell I was.

My clothes were shreds and my boots were barely holding together. My face itched. I brought my hands up to scratch and I felt a beard that had never been there before. The shock coursing through my mind hardened into an electric moment of panic as my eyes alighted on the mithral short sword tucked into my belt. My history came bursting through the cobwebs of my brain, and for the first time in many, many months, I knew.

My name, the one my parents gave me is Ryan Evan Kincaid. We were a happy, middle class family; I was an only child. My father had been designated a Wing Commander in the Air Force and was looking forward to his promotion to Full Colonel. Mom was a good-natured military wife; nothing extraordinary, just good ole' mom.

We were on vacation when history as we know it today began. That vacation was great. Dad rented a house on New Smyrna Beach. We played on the shore, rented a boat and went fishing on the Intercoastal Waterway during the day and netted shrimp at midnight. I was nine years old and the future stretched out somewhere far beyond the horizon.

Then the Eldenhaun came. With their powers of jayda, they destroyed, ruined, and annihilated the entire world, my world. In one instant a hundred thousand angry rifts pierced the fabric of our world, and through them poured the self righteous anger of these aliens, the Eldenhaun, who condemned us for poisoning and plundering our world, and threatening their own — so they said.

They turned our world against us in full revolt. Nature revolted against any and all artificial intrusions. Roots thrust up through roads; trees burst through houses. The power plant in Titusville collapsed under the weight of vines and its machinery crumbled, disintegrated, and returned as elements from the rock from which it came. Our entire civilization disappeared before our astonished eyes. The cars, the roads, and the strip malls disappeared; they couldn't even leave the goddamned aspirin. Even plastic reverted to oil and seeped down beneath the crust.

The Eldenhaun poured through with their shiny swords, spears and arrows. They rampaged through the crowds slaughtering as they went, leaving corpses where they lay. Their cries of bloodlust sounded for miles, as did the screams of their victims. Millions must have been murdered, all innocents before the merciless onslaught.

My father had taken us to the tennis club on the mainland, south of the bridge that connected New Smyrna to the beach. Watching my parents volley back and forth was so boring, I recall. That was my last complacent thought. The unearthly "swatch" sound of a rift opening stopped everybody around me. Then the massive rumblings of houses and buildings collapsing felled us to our knees. In the midst of all of this noise, the screaming began.

My father grabbed both of us and fled for the water, pushing all of us into Mosquito Lagoon. The last image I remember from that moment was the unreal flash of metal in the sun, the mithral steel my father called it after a trilogy I never read.

From that day on, my father taught us how to eat fish raw and how to collect ants on a twig. He showed us how to make smokeless pocket fires and squeeze water from our socks. He taught us snares and spears. We learned how to run and hide. We would hear the "swatch" of a rift opening and we would flee as quietly as possible in another direction. Meanwhile, the world around returned to a state of pristine wild.

When I was fourteen, my mother caught a cold that spread to her lungs. She died with spasms of asphyxia on a small bluff overlooking a lazy river; a dose of simple antibiotics would have saved her. The sky was ablaze with a million, million stars with their cold, remote light. My father and I buried her and we began to move north.

The day of "pain beyond description" happened a year later. My dad and I were laying trap lines for rabbits and small rodents when a "swatch" sounded not twenty yards from us. There was no time to run or hide when the burly Eldenhaun man stepped through with a spear at the ready. My father snatched up his long pole with the sharpened end and told me to move behind him. I did, but I could still see.