The Girl and the Guardian (The Apples of Aeden, #1)

by Peter Harris

Overview

Volume I of the 2000-plus page epic fantasy Apples of Aeden, twelve years in the making. Newly edited in October 2012, with many new coloured maps and graphics throughout.
This epic isn't for the casual reader! Be warned: this world will draw you in, and you will lose yourself in it, and as with Galadriel's realm, those who visit Aeden do not emerge unchanged. The world of the epic is ageless, esoteric, philosophical, and Romantic, exploring in a vast cycle what an intergalactic civilisation which truly honoured Love, Beauty, Truth, and Freedom might have looked like - and how it might have fallen, and how far...

The Narrator, a distracted Oxford history student, finds a cryptic manuscript connected with the Knights Templar which leads him, via a hollow yew tree and a skeleton clutching an artefact not of this world, to Chartres cathedral, and thence to a mysterious antipodean forest containing an ancient Portal.

Meanwhile Shelley Arkle of New Zealand has had a very busy 13th birthday. On the way North, summoned by her eccentric grandfather, she learned that she was adopted, her 'father' crashed the car, then she was lured into the dangerous forest of the Fairyhill Reserve, and through its Portal into the world of Aeden (sketchily remembered by humans as the Garden of Eden).

Waiting there for Shelley is a grim hermit warrior. She flees from him, and is picked up by a sinister black wagon. She is rescued by the wild Boy Raiders, but her glasses are smashed. The Boys deliver her back to the grim warrior: Korman the Outcast. He swears to be her Guardian, and together they flee the Kiraglim Trackers and Wardogs. In the cave of the learned Padrathad, Shelley eats the healing Apples of Aeden, and her eyesight becomes perfect.

She learns that Aeden was once the hub of a magical Republic of nine worlds, whose pillars were Love, Beauty, Truth and Freedom, and which once honoured the Balance of the Divine Feminine and Masculine.
Shelley realizes that the fate of Earth is linked with that of Aeden. She begins to accept the mysterious call to become the Kortana, or Jewel-caller, and find the lost Heartstone of the Tree of Life. Only thus can Aeden be saved from the fanatical life-denying Aghmaath, or thornmen. Then the lost Balance between the Masculine (Truth and Freedom) and the suppressed Feminine (Love and Beauty) will be restored and the Fifth Age will dawn.

But first they must seek the hidden refuge of Urak Tara where Shelley will learn how to become the Kortana. Along the way she meets (to name a few): the rebel Quickblade and his Boy Raiders; the wild Urxura (the origin of our unicorn myths) and their even wilder friends the elusive Evergirls; Ainenia, Lady of Aeden and exiled mistress of Avalon; the boy Rilke who gives her a blue diamond; their shared pet Worriette, a cute orphaned wurrier; the not-so-cute werewurriers; a dragon-snake; a burrow-dwelling gem-hoarding anklebiter called Bootnip (Korman's grumpy pet); the squabbling dwellers of the Bottomless Canyon; swindling agathra fossickers; a colony of poets and artists; Hillgard the rebel Guardian; and the happy Waveriders. She also falls in love twice. Guided by the troubled Korman (and sometimes guiding him) she learns many magical wisdoms, such as Walking in Faery, Guiding the Unfolding, Entering the Dreamweb, and Defence against Mindbolts and Mindwebs. Pursued by the Aghmaath, they are hampered by the fact that Korman long ago vowed not use Arcratine, his mighty firesword. One by one the remnants of the Old Order are being conquered, and they are drawn into battles and seiges as they seek the lost school of Ürak Tara.

When a fateful pact with Korman goes wrong, Shelley is left alone on an island on Lake Deadwater, deep in the thornfields. But a strange, forsaken creature from the lake comes to her aid, and together they escape, seeking Ürak Tara. She is now a true Rebel of Aeden - with a price on her h...

Product Details

BN ID:	2940044984103
Publisher:	Peter Harris
Publication date:	10/09/2012
Series:	The Apples of Aeden , #1
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

I am sometimes known (by those who approve of wizards) as The Wizard of Eutopia. I live in The Story Ark, an old army barracks on the main road of Kaiwaka, 'The Little Town of Lights' - blink and you miss it, only at night you can't because it has fairy lights everywhere. For twelve years I've been building, also on the main road (well, a little to one side of it), a sculptured ferrocement 'folly' called Café Eutopia.

What is Eutopia and why should you care? Well, it's an organic café, a temple to Love Beauty Truth and Freedom, and a bookshop - not necessarily in that order. See photos. For lots more, taken by tourists from all over the world, just enter 'Cafe Eutopia' in Google images. The tourists love me; the locals keep asking, 'When's he going to finish the darned thing?'

Unbeknown to them, for even more than those twelve years I've also been building a much more ambitious, unseen 'folly' - a fantasy epic named (in a dream after I failed to come up with a title) THE APPLES OF AEDEN. I've also written a few other books, as you can see - fiction, non-fiction and some in between.

To release the writing from the computer screen (and beat the gatekeepers of traditional publishing)I started a digital printshop and developed a quick method of book-binding, and more recently, embossing and 'edge-carving' antique-fantasy-style books (and, at the other end of the book spectrum, ebook uploading).

I spent much of my earlier life, like many of us in the troubled 'post-everything' West, in an angsty quest for Truth (between enterprises intended to feed us but always threatening to consume us - spinning wheels, clocks, oval picture frames). A teen convert to radical Christianity, I thought I should become a Bible translator, so I got a BA in classical Hebrew and Greek. But in the process I 'lost my faith' (quite rationally I think!)and became an angsty agnostic.

To feed a growing family, I tried to focus on the oval frames and sacrificed a few tormented years on the anvil of manufacturing, much of it in a cold, dickensian defunct woollen mills in Dunedin. Upon reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I had an epiphany which saved our business.

But in 1990, just when we had paid off my father-in-law and even started to make some money, the rubberband of my soul (I felt) was stretched to breaking point, and I had to leave the workshops of the North where we had moved, and go to the City to study ...