Arheled

The small town of Winsted is overshadowed by a strange and deep mystery, a secret involving the very nature of reality itself. For every hundred years the Road returns to earth, and must be walked, by those whom Arheled has called. Ancient, laden with wisdom and with sorrow, the eternal guardian of the Road watches from the mountain named Temple Fell outside the town and broods over the pettiness of Men. But this time is not like the other times. Darkness is stirring under the earth. The Lord of Chaos is growing stronger. The Father of Dragons walks in Winsted as man, and seeds Dragon-born among the young people, and despair seeps through the world like a fog. The Powers of the North begin to gather, as the world darkens around them, and ancient foes rise out of the earth and from under the earth; foes that can only be stymied, never stopped. For the world at last is ending. Arheled knows all this, as he gazes out at the Northeast of the New World, and wonders whether he will even find any who are capable of hearing his call, and if he does, what will happen to them. For the Road is spinning out powers into the ones he calls, and the children he speaks to grow strong and fell, and stone and trees and brooks shudder at their command. So he builds, and prepares, and as he constructs on many levels of being the Five Fortresses to hold the North against the final onset of the Darkness from out of the South, he shakes his head in sorrow, for he knows it is all in vain. Strong is the Road, and stronger is its Warden, buit strongest of all is the Rider of the Darkness. In the end, the fortresses will fall, and Arheled will be smashed under the feet of the Dragons, and the Gates of the North that lie buried beneath the swampy meadow two miles north of Winsted, will be taken, and Chaos will use them to open the Gates of Hell. And when he does this, no power less that God Himself will be able to destroy him. But he will not go down without a fight. He will rouse the very trees of the earth and the hills of the North against the Rider, and the Powers of the North will be aided by the unforseen abilities of mortal Men. All this lingers in his ancient mind as he whispers in dreams and speaks eerie jesting riddles to the six young people he has selected, as a Fell Winter grips Winsted. This is the Seventh Volume of Arheled, and the first volume of the World's End trilogy. Justine is left behind when her family goes on a camping trip, and hears strange voices in her dreams. A peculiar but interesting foreign couple make her acquaintence, telling her stories of Finnish myths involving the master craftsman and wisdom-singer Ilmarinen. But then other powers begin to be aware she is listening to them in her sleep, and they hunt her. Not only the sinister Frost-giant Utgard-Loki, but also the Dragon-born. As an unnatural blizzard descends on Halloween night in 2011, Justine and a woman of living metal flee to Ilmarinen.