Smoke and Stars

By Michelle Schad

Five years have been lost to a void in Reven Si’ahl’s mind. Now, everything Reven was is barreling at him faster than he can process it. Family, love, enemies, demons, and nightmares he can’t control plague him at all hours. The more he learns about his previous life, the more he questions his sanity.
Stuck with the small handful of survivors from the Phoenix Empire, Reven finds himself offering advice to his nephew, asking advice of his son, Kaleo, and learning that sometimes family can be your biggest enemy.
Meanwhile, the Kormandi King, Demyan, finds himself in need of the bard’s aid again as he is left to sort out how to escape a nation hell bent on killing people with Power. By sheer luck, and with the help of Idris Acai - an assassin and Reven’s other son - the miraculous is achieved until reaching Tierra Vida with the others. What should be a warm family reunion turns into Reven’s greatest nightmare when Kaleo is taken by the Queen of Torment herself, Madhavi. Now Reven has to accept his new role, and go rescue his urchin before it's too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chaos Publications
• Release date: Apr 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781954413115

Michelle Schad

From a young age, there have been voices inside of Michelle's head. No, not those kinds of voices - or, maybe they are; who really knows? Rather than fear those voices, Michelle wrangled them like wild mustangs on the prairie, make each one bend to her will in its own time. Well, what does that mean?It means that Michelle has been writing stories of the fantastic, the horrific, and the mysterious for as long as her little fingers have been able to hold a pen and probably longer, but memory only goes back so far. In a world that passes for 'normal', she is all of the 'normal' things one might expect: mother, wife, keeper of fur-babies. She is also a student of life, meaning if there is something to learn, she will learn it, thus making her a veritable font of only partially useful knowledge.The whimsy and ChAoS that actually controls the rest of Michelle's existence has earned her a place in two different arenas so far: Bards and Sages Quarterly and Corrugated Sky Publishing. While wielding the unwieldiness of words is her primary function, she is also an avid crafter, collector of "creepy" ball-jointed dolls, and can run through a Target in under an hour with only two extra items from her intended list. Talent!