Esmerelda's Quest 1: Deliverance

By Andy Smullin

An elf maiden, Esmerelda, Hides in a moor partly due to her own shyness and partly because of an ambitious king. She hides in a dreary waste called the Black Moor because the king hunts all practitioners of magic. He has blamed the use of magic for a drought that plagues his kingdom. Esmerelda has been taught some magic by her stepmother making her a novice and a target of the king.
Amid all this, she naturally longs for love but must overcome a tendency towards timidity which causes her to dream of meeting an elf cavalier who will come and defeat the king and whisk her away to his castle. Finally, she makes the decision to take matters into her own hands and seek out her own destiny.
However, an obstacle in the form of a ghost, long thought to be dead, has arisen from its grave to haunt her and threatens to crush her and what remaining self-confidence she has. A clan of vicious gnolls, (hyena-like monsters), complicates her task and have brought with them a dwarf-sized bundle of trouble who has a connection with the ghost from her past.
An ambitious gnome and a scaly lizard arrive to offer her hope, but at a high price. To mitigate the cost, she commits to a brazen but risky endeavor that could possibly prove to be fatal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Smullin
• Release date: Apr 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005619404

Andy Smullin

Andy Smullin has always been an enthusiastic storyteller. Since childhood he would lie in bed at night telling them to his two younger brothers. Sometimes to the dismay of his parents.When Quaker Oats included cards showing how to draw Walter Lantz cartoon characters in their cereal, he began an interest in cartooning also.After taking a typing class in high school, he put one of his stories in print (naturally, a single, hand crafted copy with illustrations in color by crayons, of course). In his senior year he stared in two plays, “The Doctor in Spite of Himself” and “Smiling Through”.He spent four years in the Navy, two of those years as a helicopter crewman and sonar operator in a helicopter squadron attached to the carrier, USS Intrepid. When the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out in 1962, we were sent to the Caribbean to participate in the blockade.After the navy. he spent a few years at Idaho State University majoring in drama. He took a playwriting class and wrote a puppet play that was performed there.For several years, he has been studying screenplay writing, mostly self-taught. He has submitted the predecessor of this story to several screenwriting competitions and did succeed in advancing in the early stages of three competitions. This book is the transition of that screenplay into book form.