The Red Stone:
The Wasaru Stones Book 1
Three thousand years of peace come to an end when nightmares of men made of metal begin to disturb the quiet life of a young girl facing her coming-of-age ceremony.
It’s hard enough being a teenager, but when heavy responsibility lands on her shoulders, things get complicated. It all starts when Thistle, a tiny wood sprite and friend of our heroine, tells the girl to leave a path leading to The Eldest Grandmother’s house, where she was to deliver a package. Something is waiting for her to find. Her world changes and is never the same again.
The idea for this book came to me many years ago while watching my granddaughters take part in a ballet about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I enjoyed the dancing very much until it came to the part where a child is thrusting a sword into another child. I never noticed how violent that book is. Much of our popular literature and entertainment features violence, often extreme violence. I once read a book where the hero, using only a sword, killed over two hundred men in a single afternoon. To my way of thinking, that’s moving into the arena of being ridiculous. I got bored and never finished the book.
So, I decided to write a book where the heroine was not allowed to use violence to solve problems. It seemed a little silly to her when first told of this. Did her mentor think she was going to go round bopping people on the head?
It stopped being funny when her people were invaded by alien beings from another planet. They were a violent, spider-like race. My heroine had to find solutions to stop the invasion without using violence herself. Along the way, help arrives in the form of an invisible black panther, two wise grandmothers, a gruff ranger, and, of course, Thistle. The following is the first page of The Red Stone.
Prologue
The fog people crept through the trees on silent feet. Water, trapped by hanging moss, waited for unsuspecting passersby. An eerie quiet settled into the very land itself. Nothing moved.
A body lay half-hidden by bracken fern in a small glen a few hundred feet from a well used trail. No broken branches, flattened blades of grass, or bent twigs gave evidence of how it got there. It rested, waiting, with no particular place to go.
Surprise registered on the face. The eyebrows arched and wrinkled the forehead. A small hole, centered between and a little above the eyes, peeked from between two of the folds. No other signs of violence marked the body. No insects had yet appeared on the scene.
The feet seemed to be out of alignment with the body. A mist covered the shoes, blurring their image. A shimmering nestled within the mist, making it difficult for the eyes to recognize a consistent pattern. At this place, the world shifted out of phase with itself.
The body’s spirit hovered nearby until it sensed the approach of another being. It floated over to the trail, left a marker, and vanished. Mid path, a rock gathered moisture left behind by the fog people. It smiled to itself, for it knew what was coming.
