Hey, everyone! Jason Chestnut, the author of To Live and Die in Avalon here and this is my idea for the first in a series of fantasy novels that I’ve been dreaming of making into a reality. In fact, I had started on this before Avalon, but switched gears to enter the Nerdist Space Opera contest! Check it out and remember, this is a draft and constantly evolving!
Blue Sword is the first book in the Aurasong series of fantasy adventure stories, set in a world where music is the gateway to magic, six-gun revolvers are carried alongside longswords and a twelve-year-old boy with a hulking pet golem can be the key to saving a kingdom from an airship captain driven mad with vengeance. A fantasy western, with shades of science fiction and steampunk, the Aurasong series combines elements inspired by Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and even the Harry Potter series.
Synopsis:
Daelus was once a homeless orphan, living on the streets of the capital city of the Eastern Kingdom, the so-called “Last True Kingdom”. Kidnapped by slavers, Dae found a rusty old War Golem, deserted in a field and to his amazement, the goliath came to life at his touch. Naming him Balder, Dae used his new found friend to free his fellow slaves and escape into the wilderness. With nowhere else to go, Dae and Balder joined Godfrey Gallant’s Traveling Circus and for the next year they lived on the road with their new family of acrobats, sword-swallowers, jugglers, freaks, and geeks.
While visiting the “Fringes” a stretch of colonies on the outskirts of an accursed land long since contaminated by war, the circus fortune teller convinces Godfrey to take Daelus and herself into the wilds of the “Ghostlands” to search for a deadly weapon, buried in a crashed airship. There they meet a quickdraw fugitive mercenary and a mysterious vigilante with strange abilities, who may be one of the last “Aurasingers”. Aurasingers were legendary warrior-bards who could channel music into magical power...a power that Daelus himself may possess. Together this band of outcasts must stop the captain of the crashed airship who has escaped with the aforementioned weapon and is now on a mission of personal revenge to destroy the capital city of the Last True Kingdom.