The Runelords Books
A young prince-wizard embarks on a journey to a far-flung fiefdom to marry a princess, a journey that soon becomes a matter of life and death
Volume Two of The Runelords Raj Ahtan, ruler of Indhopal, has used enough forcibles to transform himself into the ultimate warrior: The Sum of All Men. Ahtan seeks to bring all of humanity under his rule-destroying anything and anyone that stood in his path, including many friends and allies of young Prince Gaborn Val Orden. But Gaborn has fulfilled a two-thousand-year-old prophecy, becoming the Earth King-a mythic figure who can unleash the forces of the Earth itself. And now the struggle continues. Gaborn has managed to drive off Raj Ahtan, but Ahtan is far from defeated. Striking at far-flung cities and fortresses and killing dedicates, Ahtan seeks to draw out the Earth King from his seat of power, to crush him. But as they weaken each other's forces in battle, the armies of an ancient and implacable inhuman enemy issue forth from the very bowels of the Earth.
Wizardborn continues the story of the struggle of Gaborn, now the Earth King, who has lost his powers but continues to lead his people. He must contend with the threat of the huge, inhuman Reavers, whose myriads Gaborn and his forces must now pursue across the nation. It has become Gaborn's fate to follow, even into the depths. Raj Ahten, the great warlord endowed with the strength and qualities of thousands of men, once the primary threat to Gaborn, now struggles to retain his own empire. His war of conquest thwarted, his very life is now threatened by the Reaver thousands. And a young girl, Averan, who has eaten a Reaver and absorbed some of its memories, becomes a keystone in the search for the dark Reaver lair.
The bestselling epic breaks new ground After the events of Sons of the Oak , Fallion and Jaz, the sons of the great Earth King Gaborn, are living as fugitives in their own kingdom, newly invaded and secretly controlled by supernatural being of ultimate evil. The sons are hiding until they can regain their rightful places in the land. Fallion seems destined to heal the world, and feels the supernatural calling to act. When he calls on his powers to do so though, two entire worlds collapse into one, and every living thing on both worlds is transformed into an entirely new being―yet still somehow the same. Evil is certainly still the same, and may have influenced this for a terrible purpose.
With Gaborn's kingdom in ruins, four powerful kings march to claim its spoils, even as a vast army of reavers from the underworld sallies forth, intending to put an end to mankind. In one last-ditch effort to heal the earth, Averan leads the Earth King far below the surface to the Lair of Bones, to confront the leader of the reaver hordes. There Gaborn must confront an ancient evil - before the world is torn apart. In this fourth volume of THE RUNELORDS series, David Farland continues to rewrite the boundaries of epic fantasy. There are only impossible decisions for his protagonists, and the evil of the reavers may simply be a mask for the true horrors to come...
Certain works of fantasy are immediately recognizable as monuments, towering above the rest of the category. Authors of those works, such as Stephen R. Donaldson, Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind, come immediately to mind. Add to that list David Farland, whose epic Runelords series continues now in Sons of the Oak . The story picks up eight years after the events of Lair of Bones and begins a new chapter in the Runelords saga focusing on Gaborn's son, Fallion. Gaborn, the Earth King, has been traveling far from his home, to strange and unknown places. While beyond the edge of the earth, he finally succumbs to the accelerated aging that comes from all of the endowments he has taken. His death is the signal for a revolution, an attack from the supernatural realms by immensely powerful immortal beings. These forces have discovered that Gaborn's son is the resurrection of an immortal, one whose potential power is so great that he might be able to reorder the entire universe. Fallion's enemies have decided that they must control him, and failing that, destroy him. He is only a child, but he is the heir to Gaborn's kingdom, and so must flee to the ends of the earth to avoid the destruction of all that Gaborn accomplished. One of the mightiest of contemporary fantasy epics continues.
The Saga of the Runelords is written in the finest tradition of Tolkien and other works that rise above the fantasy genre to special and individual heights. Now the epic story continues: at the end of Worldbinder, Fallion Orden, son of Gaborn, was imprisoned on a strange and fantastic world that he created by combining two alternate realities. It's a world brimming with dark magic, ruled by a creature of unrelenting evil who is gathering monstrous armies from a dozen planets in a bid to conquer the universe. Only Fallion has the power to mend the worlds, but at the heart of a city that is a vast prison, he lies in shackles. The forces of evil are growing and will soon rage across the heavens. Now, Fallion's allies must risk everything in an attempt to free him from the wyrmling horde.
The world of the Runelords has been combined by magic with another parallel world to form a new one, the beginning of a process that may unify all worlds into the one true world. This story picks up after the events of The Wyrmling Horde and follows two of Farland's well-known heroes, Borenson and Myrrima, on a quest to save their devastated land and the people of the new world from certain destruction. But the land is not the only thing that has been altered forever: in the change, Borenson has merged with a mighty and monstrous creature from the other world, Aaath Ulber. He begins to be a different person, a berserker warrior, as well as having a huge new body because of the transformation of worlds. Thousands have died, lands have sunk below the sea and, elsewhere, risen from it. The supernatural rulers of the world are part of a universal evil, yet play a Byzantine game of dark power politics among themselves. And Aaath Ulber is now the most significant pawn in that game.
Long before the Runelords ruled Mystarria, a young Inkarran boy named Dval rose to power, waging war against his own people, a mad foreign king, and the terrifying new creatures called the "Toth" that threaten to destroy all of mankind. This is the opening short story for a new saga in the Runelords universe.
Young Dval managed to save young Averan, along with his own life, but there are far more dangerous creatures in the world: the fearsome toth, and Mad King Harrill. This is the second tale in the new saga of the Runelords.