There Is Life in the Tree and Death in the Well

by Shane Burkholder

Overview

The world is dying.

Magick has poisoned the soul of the land and driven it mad. The Sun God has been slain atop his throne, loosing a tide of blood and twilight across the skies. Aberrant creatures shamble out of the long forgotten dark to stalk the steps of humankind. This is the Pale Age of Man. In it, hope is a foreign word known only to a desperate few.

Arnem, an orphan in the crumbling city of Sulidhe, is such a one. For all his young life, he has chased the dream of becoming a monster hunter. It was the fire that nurtured his heart even as the world broke around him. But as his childish dalliances lead him to discover a series of mutilated bodies in the city's canals, he is unwittingly conscripted into a conflict older than time.

Armed with only his rags and his wits, alone save for his three-eyed dog, Arnem must navigate the endless perils of the day to prevent an everlasting night. Plague ravages the city's poor as its bureaucrats vie for the favor of their wizard masters; a secretive new religion is rapidly winning converts and influence, sowing discord amongst the established order; and the magickal wards that have protected Sulidhe's walls for centuries begin to fail and sputter out. Fertile ground is laid for the rebirth of a terror out of Man's earliest memories, the grim inheritor of a war in which the ancients thought themselves victorious.

A war between the life in the Tree and the death in the Well.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940180733290
Publisher:	Shane Burkholder
Publication date:	10/23/2024
Sold by:	Draft2Digital
Format:	eBook
File size:	503 KB

About the Author

Born, raised, resides: Shane is perhaps the only person proud to call himself a Rust Belter—but no one can argue it doesn't make for a good story.

Growing up amidst decay required him to invent tales of adventure and consequence until he was old enough to put imagining aside and live out his own. Unfortunately by then the damage was already done: He became a writer.

An innate love of the fantastical and a passion for the classics instills his writing with a kind of modernist mythmaking. Through the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien and Gene Wolfe, he became fascinated with stories told speculatively but reinforced with the verisimilitude and narrative purpose of the literary. After all, could Heart of Darkness really not be improved with a little eldritch horror to accompany the existential? Such a recreation is an ideal he daily pursues.

When not punching the keys of his typewriter, Shane can either be found playing a few rounds of Hunt: Showdown or strolling through aisle after aisle at the bookstore until recommitting himself to the insidiously growing backlog at home.