Dawnbringer: The Complete Story (Dawnbringer: Lightborn)

Lightborn is the centerpiece of the Dawnbringer series of novels in the world of Irándiel, upon the small continent of Telmérion, cold and rugged and yet inhabited since the beginning of human history by the first family of humankind. Though the setting is high fantasy—a work of co-creative imagination fashioning a mythical world with its own history and geography—the plot and the ins-and-outs of the world are deeply realistic, portraying as it were an ancient and long-forgotten past of our own world. Or more precisely, what is offered here is a mythical exposition of the true past that we all share—with very little magic or other fantasy tropes, but with a great deal of “magic,” in other words, a world filled with wonders and terrors of all kinds, from the ancient guardians of the world, the Anaíon, to vicious and deadly beasts such as dragons, eötenga, and vru’ádach. The characters thus find themselves caught in the cosmic battle between light and darkness, between the weakness of love and the power of hate, which casts its rays and its shadows also into the heart of every man and woman. The journey marked out before their feet calls for integrity, fidelity, and heroism, and also something more, something that lies at the heart of every good adventure and every life, and which is the very measure of man.

When Eldárien returns to his homeland after many years away—burdened by the awareness that he has perpetrated great evil at the hands of an Empire whose knight he has become—he encounters a continent riven by strife and war and threatened by creatures even more horrifying, born of the very darkness itself. He wishes to lay aside the sword, to leave behind a past marked with violence and bloodshed, but he also longs to aid his people against the forces that endanger their very existence. And such a path he cannot walk alone, facing obstacles both within and without, and he finds given to him both the light that he wishes to serve and friends to share the journey. All the while the land that he loves slides inexorably into conflict, into what shall be known henceforth as the War of Darkness, and he and those to whom he is joined are called upon to share the fate of their people, looking forward in hope to the promised coming of dawn after darkest night.

Throughout time myth has been one of the fundamental activities of the human heart as it seeks to contemplate and understand the mystery of reality, to find a path through the fabric of history as its tapestry is ever woven, a path that unveils meaning in the enigmas of life and gives sense and stability to the drama of existence. But especially, the activity of myth, of fantasy, is born of a primal wonder before the awesome miracle of being, and of the fundamental human activity which is play, and serves to keep this wonder and play alive always. In precisely this way it has been, and shall always be, a catalyst to enkindle and deepen the longing in the heart of each one of us for redemption—for a new and better world, a world where righteousness and happiness dwell, and all is freedom and purpose, unity and harmony, ecstatic delight and true adventure.

Such does Dawnbringer humbly seek, stepping into the flowing current of thought and imagination as it surges on through history, offering, in a narrative of proportions both intimate and epic, a glimpse of the light that shines upon us all, and of the conflict that resides at the center of every life, that the weak again may be strong and the child again may be king.