by Ivy Logan
The Heichi could have given his mother sanctuary. She made one mistake, all for the sake of love. He didn’t mind if they killed him or banished him. The Dueija were bloodthirsty, but at least they were direct. No pretensions. They simply wanted to kill him. But Siobhan’s punishment humiliated his mother. She had already lost her husband and the father of her child. Now Siobhan was exacting the ultimate prize.
Ava had to have known the punishment the queen would award her friend. She looked heartbroken but he knew the truth. It was all an act. He would soon be an orphan, and it was all her fault. Ava was the one who sent his mother, Selena to help his father. Now she had washed her hands off them. She hadn’t mentioned her visit to Galati or prior knowledge of his existence even once. Was she scared that the queen would punish her too?
Tagasaya was unaware that Selena had wiped Ava’s memory. He was convinced that Ava had abandoned them. Even pleaded for mercy on their behalf, as though they were beggars, pretending that she had nothing to do with any of this. He hated her and Siobhan with a vengeance far greater than what he felt for the rest of the Heichi and their human allies.
For now he would leave with his mother, Tagasaya decided. He vowed to do whatever it took to survive and return stronger and invincible. Vengeance would be his.
After Tagasaya took control of Htrae and Earth, Ava and the rest of the Heichi would be his to destroy.
CHAPTER IX:
THE PURGE – THE WAR BETWEEN HUMANS AND SUPERNATURALS
The discontent between the supernaturals and the humans simmered under the surface for many years. But Satoshi’s violent death brought things to a head. The Dueijians began plotting and planning.
One day they went on a rampage, a killing spree that left a path of death and devastation. Humans found a valid reason to call for the destruction of the supernaturals. There was a call for ‘colonization’, but Siobhan knew that it was a loosely used word for annihilation. The real intention would be to herd them together and then- confine, experiment or eliminate. A battle cry had been sounded against all the supernaturals. The mortals were coming for them! Famed hunters and scavengers would scourge the entire sphere in their effort to systematically unmask and terminate the supernaturals. An atmosphere of superstition and unease prevailed, making Earth an unsafe sanctuary for her kind.
Siobhan saw the writing on the wall. A great war was coming.
The death anniversary of Nia, the girl who died at Satoshi’s hands, united all factions of humans. Even sympathetic humans, who traditionally tried to protect the supernaturals, stayed silent this time. Everyone had a mother, daughter, or wife they treasured and wanted to protect. The tide turned against the supernaturals.
The sporadic hunts and attacks on the supernaturals culminated into the Purge, or the Great War. The supernaturals were too divergent to unite and fight their cause together, but all over the world each clan put up a ferocious fight. The death toll on both sides was rising. As with any war, the greatest casualties were amongst the women and children.
The supernaturals had lived in the darkness for too long. Stronger than humans, they yielded to them for the sake of peace. But now their very survival was at stake. The Heichi were protectors of humans, but also the saviours of all the supernatural clans. If the very existence of supernaturals were in doubt, then the greatest power of the Heichi would be unleashed. A force that mankind had never encountered before. Victory would be won, but at the cost of destruction of mankind.
The Heichi always had an inborn affinity for peace. They cared for humans. Many of them had human families. They could not allow humanity to end.
A united effort by all the sorceresses set in motion a devious sleight of hand, one of astonishing scale and magnitude. Humans would believe that Earth was theirs in victory. The War would end.
The endangered supernaturals would vanish from Earth in entirety and exist in a realm parallel to Earth.
The Heichi infused their collective powers to begin shaping a new, uncharted world. Thus began the genesis of ‘Htrae’, their new home. Imbued with the deep magic of the Heichi, this new land would replicate certain features of Earth, their planet of origin, but would also be a unique, ever changing world in itself.
The Heichi Elders conjured a powerful divide, a Veil – a permanent barrier and an invisible segregation between Earth and Htrae. It protected the supernaturals from the humans, but it would also be a shield for humans, themselves from the more devious supernaturals. Without the Veil, at some point creatures like the Dueija, dragons, the giants or the even the werewolves were bound to attack humans again. The Veil would be invincible as long as good triumphed over evil on Earth. Pockets of evil would result in sporadic infractions, called gateways, but the Veil would remain standing. The co-existence of good and evil was the hope for the future. In the event of a breach, if the Veil ever fell, only love, sacrifice and hope would restore and resurrect it again.
Thus, the supernaturals abandoned Earth, but not before the Heichi did their best to ensure its safety. They vowed to watch over Earth, to prevent the catastrophe of a breach from ever coming to pass. The sorceresses, who remained behind on Earth with their human families, would be the guardians of the Veil. Ava chose to be the first of the guardians. Other followed her example.
The Breach Chronicles is the story of the guardian sorceresses who walked the Earth.
…The Beginning
Broken
(Book I of The Breach Chronicles)
By Ivy Logan
BROKEN BUT NOT LOST
The dark shadow cast by an ancient prophecy shatters an innocent family, but all that is broken is not lost and will rise again.
Half-blood sorceress, Talia, had a unique childhood. It might have been bereft of dolls but not of love. Instructed in combat skills and trained to escape detection, she was schooled to face an unknown menace. Yet, when her family’s worst nightmare comes to pass, Talia finds her protected life spinning out of control. Everything she believes in, and everyone she loves, is cruelly snatched away. Talia is forced to flee the attentions of a mad king and denied her supernatural legacy.
She chooses the path of retribution, devoid of love and friendship, but learns that sometimes love is received even if not sought.
‘Broken’ is a tale about Talia’s coming of age, reuniting with her family and seeking vengeance. Most of all it chronicles Talia’s rise from the ashes and her journey into finding herself again.
Read Talia’s epic saga of love, sacrifice, friendship, and discovering the hero within set against a background of time travel and supernatural forces.
Read more about Ivy Logan at
https://www.facebook.com/ivyloganauthor
https://ivylogan.wordpress.com
https://fantasybooksivylogan.wordpress.com
Follow Ivy on Twitter @Ivyloganauthor
Find Ivy on Instagram where she posts as wordsbyivylogan
Broken, a supernatural fantasy romance was Ivy’s debut novel. It is part of a series, Breach Chronicles. ‘Metamorphosis’ is the next book in the series. Ivy is extremely passionate about stories, especially those steeped in mythical folklore, ancient myths, and legends. She loves tales suffused with the magic of unique realms and supernatural worlds. ‘Redemption’ is the next book in the series
Ivy especially enjoys writing about strong women and girls, who are far from perfect, but find it in themselves to stand against wrong. Her characters are fighters, but with hearts. They love, they cry, they hurt, and they bleed, too. They believe in family, friendship, and sacrifice. They might live in fantasy worlds, but they are as real, as fragile, and as strong as you and me.
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King Arthur has fascinated the Western world for over a thousand years and yet we still know nothing more about him now than we did then. Layer upon layer of heroics and exploits has been piled upon him to the point where history, legend and myth have become hopelessly entangled.
In recent years, there has been a sort of scholarly consensus that 'the once and future king' was clearly some sort of Romano-British warlord, heroically stemming the tide of wave after wave of Saxon invaders after the end of Roman rule. But surprisingly, and no matter how much we enjoy this narrative, there is actually next-to-nothing solid to support this theory except the wishful thinking of understandably bitter contemporaries. The sources and scholarship used to support the 'real Arthur' are as much tentative guesswork and pushing 'evidence' to the extreme to fit in with this version as anything involving magic swords, wizards and dragons. Even Archaeology remains silent. Arthur is, and always has been, the square peg that refuses to fit neatly into the historians round hole.
Arthur: Shadow of a God gives a fascinating overview of Britain's lost hero and casts a light over an often-overlooked and somewhat inconvenient truth; Arthur was almost certainly not a man at all, but a god. He is linked inextricably to the world of Celtic folklore and Druidic traditions. Whereas tyrants like Nero and Caligula were men who fancied themselves gods; is it not possible that Arthur was a god we have turned into a man? Perhaps then there is a truth here. Arthur, 'The King under the Mountain'; sleeping until his return will never return, after all, because he doesn't need to. Arthur the god never left in the first place and remains as popular today as he ever was. His legend echoes in stories, films and games that are every bit as imaginative and fanciful as that which the minds of talented bards such as Taliesin and Aneirin came up with when the mists of the 'dark ages' still swirled over Britain – and perhaps that is a good thing after all, most at home in the imaginations of children and adults alike – being the Arthur his believers want him to be.
Weirder War Two
By Richard Denham & Michael Jecks
Did a Warner Bros. cartoon prophesize the use of the atom bomb? Did the Allies really plan to use stink bombs on the enemy? Why did the Nazis make their own version of Titanic and why were polar bear photographs appearing throughout Europe?
The Second World War was the bloodiest of all wars. Mass armies of men trudged, flew or rode from battlefields as far away as North Africa to central Europe, from India to Burma, from the Philippines to the borders of Japan. It saw the first aircraft carrier sea battle, and the indiscriminate use of terror against civilian populations in ways not seen since the Thirty Years War. Nuclear and incendiary bombs erased entire cities. V weapons brought new horror from the skies: the V1 with their hideous grumbling engines, the V2 with sudden, unexpected death. People were systematically starved: in Britain food had to be rationed because of the stranglehold of U-Boats, while in Holland the German blockage of food and fuel saw 30,000 die of starvation in the winter of 1944/5. It was a catastrophe for millions.
At a time of such enormous crisis, scientists sought ever more inventive weapons, or devices to help halt the war. Civilians were involved as never before, with women taking up new trades, proving themselves as capable as their male predecessors whether in the factories or the fields.
The stories in this book are of courage, of ingenuity, of hilarity in some cases, or of great sadness, but they are all thought-provoking - and rather weird. So whether you are interested in the last Polish cavalry charge, the Blackout Ripper, Dada, or Ghandi’s attempt to stop the bloodshed, welcome to the Weirder War Two!
Click Bait
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A funny joke’s a funny joke. Eddie Doolan doesn’t think twice about adapting it to fit a tragic local news story and posting it on social media.
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Eddie knows he’s blown his relationship with rich girl Lily Cumnock. It’s Lily’s possessive and controlling father Brodie who fires him from his job - and makes sure he won’t find another decent one in Langburn. And Eddie doesn’t even have Flo to fall back on - his old nan died some six months ago, and Eddie is still recovering from the death of the woman who raised him and who loved him unconditionally.
Under siege from the press, and facing charges not just for the joke but for a history of abusive behaviour on the internet, Eddie grows increasingly paranoid and desperate. The only people still speaking to him are Crow, a neglected kid who relies on Eddie for food and company, and Sid, the local gamekeeper’s granddaughter. It’s Sid who offers Eddie a refuge and an understanding ear.
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Though perhaps things aren't that bad after all. Tammy discovers up North isn’t in fact as terrible as she feared and a fresh start may have been just what she needed. Somewhere no-one knows her and she can be whoever she wants to be.
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