The Fire and the Storm - Metric Pro Edition: Fiction, Dragons, Elves, Unicorns, Magic

The Fire And The Storm

Book Two

of

The Nexus Of Kellaran

By

Wayne Edward Clarke

2012 First Edition

With Metric (SI) measurement units.

CopyrightÓ2012

By

Wayne Edward Clarke

All Rights Reserved

Cover design by Wayne Edward Clarke

Original artwork by
Dana Robinson

This is a work of fiction.  Any resemblance between the characters and any real persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

The purchaser of this ebook may copy this ebook to any computers, ebook reading devices, or backup digital storage media that the purchaser personally owns.  This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people by the purchaser.  This ebook may not be loaned by the purchaser to other people unless the purchaser is also loaning the ebook reading device that this ebook will be read on.  This ebook may not be copied to any device or media that is not personally owned by the purchaser.  The purchaser must delete this ebook from any devices or media that the purchaser is selling, giving away, or disposing of.  For the purposes of this statement of rights; corporations are not people.  Corporations must purchase one copy of each eBook for each human person associated with the company who will read them.

Books By Wayne Edward Clarke:

The Rational Future Series:

People Of The Tiger

Hunters In The Sky

The Nexus Of Kellaran Series:

Blessings Of A Curse

The Fire And The Storm

These novels are available in every ebook format at my website:

http://wayneedwardclarke.jigsy.com/

And at leading ebook retailers

And on popular ebook apps for Apple and Android devices.

Contents

Map of Debivin

Map of Felion

Map of Serminak and Xervia

Map of Kletiuk

Foreword

Story

The fact that this book is not divided into chapters in not an omission, it’s a carefully considered stylistic choice.

Maps

Foreword to the first edition.

Writing this book has been more difficult than writing my previous novels.  It was written during a disastrous period in my life, and I was challenged to produce a sequel that lived up to the quality and epic scope of Blessings Of A Curse.  I apologize to the fans who have waited so long for it.  But it’s finally finished, and I’m proud of it.

Though I’ve included a brief summary of events in Blessings Of A Curse at the beginning of the story, it’s only extensive enough to remind those who’ve read the first book of those events.  The summary is definitely NOT extensive enough to allow this book to stand on it’s own;  If you haven’t read Blessings Of A Curse, then you’re likely to be confused in many places in The Fire And The Storm.  Please read Blessings Of A Curse first, in order to fully enjoy this book.

The fact that this book is not divided into chapters in not an omission, it’s a carefully considered stylistic choice.

Other elements of my style that the reader should note are my use of
italics
to indicate quoted sentences that are telepathically or psionicly communicated.  For example;

“It’s wonderful to be able to think with you, mind-to-mind.”

I use the same MSWord files for both eBooks and paper books, and paper book printers don’t like bold or underlined text, so I also use
italics
occasionally to indicate words that are spoken with intensity.  For example;

“You are absolutely
out
of your
mind!
” he growled.

If a sentence is already
italicized
bcause it’s a telepathic communication, any words in that sentence that are communicated with extra intensity will be indicated by being non-italicized, for example;

“That’s all a bunch of
crap
, and you know it.”
she psionically repremanded him.

I use ALL CAPITALS occasionally to indicate yelling or great loudness, whether the words are spoken or telepathic; volume and intensity being distinct qualities.

In this story, many common words are also the names of magic spells, such as Sending, Flight, and Speaking, or have traditionally had highly religious connotations like The Source, and those words are capitalized to indicate this.

Since languages began, they have constantly changed and evolved.  The advents of written language and printing both slowed language evolution, but it still goes on.  Sometimes the resulting conventions that make up ‘proper English’ don’t make a lot of sense, and they are slightly different in every English-speaking country.  In most of these cases I’ve caved and used the conventions anyway in order to avoid irritating my readers who are sensitive about these things, like writing ‘seven thousand, three hundred and fifty-five’.  It makes no sense that the compound words for numbers up to one hundred are hyphenated, like fifty-five, and the others aren’t, like three thousand.  But I go with it anyway.

However, there are some English conventions that I absolutely refuse to follow because they distort the emotional connotations of the writing.  I’ll point out the most common one here so that you’ll know that it’s not a mistake; I’m doing it on purpose.  If a quoted sentence is a question or an exclamation, it is conventionally written as a complete sentence within quotations, for example;

“Get down!” she yelled.  Or;

“Is that right?” he asked.

However if a sentence that would normally end in a period is a quotation, correct English says that it should be ended with a comma.  For example;

“I live here,” he said.

But the comma makes it a sentence fragment rather than a complete sentence, and leaves the reader hanging, giving a different emotional feel to the writing compared to the way I would write it, which is;

“I live here.” he said.

I only use a comma to end a quotation if it truly is a sentence fragment, because the sentence was interupted where a comma would normally go.  For example;

“I live here,” he said, “And you’re not welcome.”

I suppose in that case I shouldn’t capitalize the word ‘and’, since it’s not really the first word in a sentence, but it bugs me if I don’t.

There are a few other conventions that I don’t follow, so if you see what would normally be considered a writing mistake that is repeated consistently in every possible instance in the book, you’ll know that I’m doing that on purpose too.

It’s hard to change what is considered Correct English, but I hope that other writers who read my books will agree with me about these points and do the same in their own writing, and that eventually doing it our way will be correct.

Coming this spring to
my website
!

*A new rotatable 3D map of the globe of Kellaran with much more detail and showing every place that is mentioned in the series.

*A complete list of major characters with descriptions.

*A timeline of major Kellarani historical events.

*And an appendix of encyclopedic facts and figures about Kellaran.

Wayne Edward Clarke, January 20, 2012.

The Fire And The Storm

(If you are reading this account in a language other than Grand High Draconian, you might consider making a contribution to the Translation section of your local Magic Users Guild. XVD)