Publisher's Synopsis
Brother Jacob was trained from his childhood to defend the sacred relics of the Whitehaven monastery with techniques of the quarterstaff. Now as a young man, he has become troubled over his routine life in the monastery. He thinks he might see the world and find better action putting on matches for the traveling circus.
Soon he is longing for the comforts of monastery again as he slavishly labors under his new masters as baggage-boy.He manages to escape, hiding in the mysterious forest stretching North from his monastery. Real adventurers are camping in the woods, dangerous mountaineers, among whose members is a mad dwarf who gambles on the raw power of old heathenry. The dwarf captures Jacob and claims him as an offering, a human sacrifice upon eldritch pagan altar stones. With his own eyes he sees the specter of world's dark genius, The Dire of Melancholy. The other mountaineers deliver him and invite Jacob to join their quest.He refuses and escapes again, hurrying back to the quasi-safety of the monastery and religious brothers. The struggle against evil, warned of in scripture, is all too real. A malicious and dangerous conspiracy is afoot, a plot of the shadow-world and its high druid, the Dire of Melancholy, enemy of all that is holy. The Friars of Whigg, rivals to Whitehaven momastery, plan to counter the Unholy Overlord and fight with ancient battle-magic by means of a foolish plan: resurrect the wizards of the ancient world, bringing them out from the tombs of Nystol's desolated towers, and direct their famous magic against the their old enemy the Dire.Is it right to invoke the power of Resurrection on the decaying wizards of old? Would that not misuse the miracle-gift of God, and profane the sacred faith? Jacob, eyewitness to the Dire of Melancholy, is enlisted in the controversy. As suspicion and fear engulf the monastery, Jacob is falsely accused of arcane summoning.So he throws in with that renegade band of mountaineers: "The Valraphs", to scale the walls of the Dire's impregnable fortress, and infiltrate. Led by a brave but hot-headed amazon, they set out into a world of magic and wonder, a world at the brink of a new dawn of evil...but in his contest of wits with the Dire of Melancholy himself, Jacob could become the dupe by which all the world is deceived, and forfeit even his immortal soul.
