A Song for Ristfand (Dawnbringer: Lightborn). This item is unavailable.A Song for Ristfand (Dawnbringer: Lightborn)

Following on the events of the first volume, the catalyst of which now becomes a consuming conflagration, the War of Darkness begins in earnest. And in the shadow of the forces here revealed, the tension of the civil war and the threat of the power-hungry Empire pales almost into insignificance. Light and darkness are laid bare in their true nature, though one is frail and faltering, weak and vulnerable, while the other appears all but invincible and uncontainable. But they lie hidden in every heart. Thus suspicions and fears arise even among those who stand to fight the encroaching forces; but so, too, capacities for love and heroism are also stirred into flame in the most humble and hidden hearts, summoning them forth to answer the desperate cries of a civilization on the brink of chaos, conflict, and even collapse.

Lightborn is the standalone centerpiece of the Dawnbringer series of novels and the narrative heart of the Tales of Irándiel. This world is the sole artifact of my mythopoetic imagination and a lifelong fruit of both love and wonder, born of the desire that through the mysterious power of imagination and story the primordial light may shine to give solace and consolation, to stir our hearts to awe and lighthearted gratitude, and to awaken the compassion that embraces the world in both its brokenness and its beauty.

This is not a fantasy novel in the contemporary sense, but an act of contemplation through storytelling, taking its place firmly within the age-old tradition of exploring the meaning of reality through myth. It is a way of enacting, through the work of mythopoeia, both philosophia and theologia. It is a way of exploring, in other words, both the love of wisdom and the mystery of God.

This does not mean, of course, that the world and its characters and the dramatic events of the narrative do not exist for their own sake and in their own right. Rather, I have fallen in love with them again and again over the years, and it is my humble hope that upon entering into the world of Irándiel through these pages, you too may come to love these persons so like ourselves in their joys and their sorrows, in their hopes and their struggles, and may see refracted through the prism of this co-created world, lovingly woven in detail both epic and intimate, the beauty of the real world that we all share—a world bathed in the radiance of the light at the origin of all things and the love that has sung the universe into existence.