Spirit
Followers
Instruments
of Sacrifice Book 1
by
Lydia Redwine
Genre:
Fantasy
When
a Royal dies, the realms elect the one to take their place. By
reasons Camaria does not know, her realm elects her as the next
Royal. Now that she is the new-found sixteenth Royal of the nation of
Mirabelle, Cam embarks on a journey with her sisters and a young
huntsman to the four realms of the nation to complete training in the
four kinds of magic. Once she has completed this training, she will
then be permitted to consume her annual amount of magic and possess
manifested powers. Her ventures are unexpectedly steeped in
precarious events when Cam discovers a secret plan of revolt, a past
she never knew, and an ancient people group thought dead who call
themselves the Spirit Followers.
Keepers
of the Crown
Instruments
of Sacrifice Book 2
Camaria
is chasing the sparks of a war and trying to put them out before her
world erupts into flames and all is gone. The vanishing of the magic
of Mirabelle is only the beginning and the Seekers are formed to find
its captors. Camaria, her sister Fiera, the young huntsman Caleb,
Cinis Lumen leader Tyron, former Gnosi heir Riah, and two others are
sent east to find their stolen magic, but each has a mission of their
own. Cam, having been banished from two of Mirabelle’s realms, is
determined to redeem herself by locating the legendary Crown of
Caelae, prophesied by the Watchers, one of which was Peter’s
father. Riah continues his secret quest to become one of the
unidentified master’s seven warriors. Fiera still holds the wooden
ball with its strange message inside, and Caleb has a secret past of
his own. Peter, who remains in Mirabelle, is on the brink of
discovering all of his father’s secrets and forming a plot of
revenge on those who had killed Daniel years ago. Their own ventures
are put on hold when they suddenly cross paths with an unexpected
enemy in the perilous land called the Valley of Poison.
Lydia
Redwine is a young author from Cincinnati, Ohio, who, by the age of
18, has published a fantasy novel and a poetry collection in aim to
create work that is both refreshing and impactful.
GUEST POST
Call Me Unconventional
The most
interesting thing to me as an author about learning about other
authors is that we all have a different story concerning how we came
to write. What most of us have in common is that we found our love
for storytelling at a very young age and many of us can’t even
remember when “becoming a writer” became the main objective in
life.
I do remember. I
was nine years old, homeschooled and taking a writing course on
ancient history. I was writing research papers on everything from
Gilgamesh to Julius Caesar. I was also just beginning my five-year
obsession with the Nancy Drew mystery stories. I loved reading and I
was just beginning to discover that not only did I love writing, but
I wasn’t too terrible at it either. It was then that I decided I
was going to be an author when I grew up. Then, I decided growing up
was too far away so I started writing then and there. I published my
first book when I was 14. (You can buy it on Amazon but I don’t
remember who even edited it…if it got any real editing done.)
I guess you could
say I’ve been doing things unconventionally since then. Last
spring, when I graduated high school, I decided that instead of going
to college, I was going to publish a poetry collection and write a
fantasy series instead. So, at my high school graduation, as my other
homeschool co-op classmates gave their speeches, I nervously waited
to present a poem about why college wasn’t
for me. I made all the women in my family cry. Some homeschool dads
came up to me and told me how well I had done. (I wrote that poem an
hour earlier during a 6 hour car drive.) Since then, I haven’t
really edited it, but I would like to share it since it marks such an
important decision in my life.
Ode
To That Which I Have Learned In 12 Years of Home Education:
The cytoplasm
refers to all of the cellular material
inside the plasma
membrane, other than the nucleus.
You can find the
rate at which a block
is going to slide
down an incline at
a velocity of 2.3
meters per second
using Newton’s
second law of motion.
And I’m supposed
to know the square root of 231,
but instead, I am
asking:
how will this
help me in the real world?
as if what I’m
learning cannot be defined as real if it is also hard.
I ask:
how does knowing
the square root of 231
help in real,
hard times?
Because what if
like the zombie apocalypse,
or like alien
invasion, our world brinking on eternal eclipse,
or like Jesus is
coming back
and evil is rearing
its horns, eyes reddened
and what if we’re
the next Christians to be beheaded?
I would then rather
know how to kneel for my savior in heaven
than to kneel for a
vessel of evil even while he is still human.
So now, knowing the
square root of 231 doesn’t seem as important…
But since I love
the Lord, I want to know the square root of 231
because it is part
of the language with which He built this world.
And the cytoplasm
of a cell is only a shred of that world.
Learning doesn’t
end when I get a
job,
it’s like why
would I ever want my love for God to end
so why would I want
my love for learning to end?
So if you want a
job working for another man
find yourself a
test written by man for man
rather than living.
because living,
living and learning
is the true test
and praying is the
preparation.
I would rather be
up til’ 4 in the morning
on my knees praying
than finding that I’m drowning,
drowning in sums
that seem they’ll never amount to anything.
You see, the
destination is not another institution
of education built
by men with misperceptions
that this world is
all that there is.
So while I do
know what the cytoplasm is,
how to find
velocity, what the square root of 231 is,
I also know how to
lead,
how a conversation
can change the course of a life,
how to find
inspiration in the dullest of stories.
And my love of the
Lord is reflected
in quoting Atticus
Finch,
in the words which
I craft
in an effort to be
like Bronte and Dickens.
I’ve found that
the words of Christ far
outweigh those of
Aristotle, Homer, and Darwin.
Which means His
words can outweigh the great thinkers of today.
You see leaning on
the Lord
rather than leaning
on a grade
means I’m
learning of God,
I’m knowing the
Lord,
and I do not need
to know the world.
The world does not
need to know me.
And by the way,
the square root
of 231 is 15.1986841536
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