”You’ve so many names and I haven’t a one.”
One man does not know who he is, one man does not know what he is; one man is prey, one man is protector; one man is the weaver of life, one man is the keeper of peace—the dreamer and the defender, the Aisling and the Guardian—and together they begin a dark and dangerous journey that sets them up as both adversary and ally, as they try to bring order to chaos in a game of political control, the threat of war looming behind every move.
And once again I am prisoner to my Kindle, slave to my inability to read without succumbing to that pesky need to sleep, obsessing over two characters who’ve robbed me of my ability to put into words how neatly they’ve overtaken my insatiable need to know every minute detail about who they are, where they’ve been, and where they will go.
Wilfred Calder—peaceful river—the man who is neither calm nor still, the man who has claimed the identity of another because he has none of his own, though the one he’s claimed is contrary to who he is and how he’s been forced to live. No identity, no past, nowhere to belong, no one he belongs to, Wil is a man who was born the day he latched onto a stranger’s name.
Dallin Brayden—brave, pride’s people—the man who is courageous and honorable and has a role to fulfill, though he had no idea what that role was until he met the man who would become ”Useful, and so, therefore, useable.” Born in the land known as the Cradle, the Bethlehem in which all boy children were ordered destroyed, though a mother’s sacrifice allowed one to survive, ”One cannot be reborn without returning to the Womb,” and so the journey of discovery begins, the way paved with treachery and mistrust. Will they return to the origin and begin again?
The meaning of the name means everything to the identity. The name isn’t merely the way in which one is summoned or greeted. The name is the sanctuary; it is the way home.
“The lads got scars you e’nt seen.” And scars we have seen. And those scars serve as proof that Wil has not only lived, but survived. They are the badge that proves he has endured for his own sake, if not for the sake of others. At least for now. What is to come will depend upon the Mother, the Father, the Aisling and the Guardian, and the threats from within and without that shadow them always.
”Wend nightmare into fancy, guide fancy into hope, then watch as the waking world shreds the tapestry, rending warp from the carefully-woven weft, and unwinds the threads to be mended again.”
Who could possibly resist such an invitation?
Buy Aisling Book One: Guardian HERE.
I hate it when people remind me of books that are on my TBR list but still unread. The plot, and the sample I read, months ago, should have already made me buy it, but somehow it slipped between the cracks. I’ll get there eventually.
I had this one on my TBR list forever too, and I have no idea what made me read Wolf’s-own: Ghost first, but now that I’ve found Carole, I can’t stop reading everything of hers I can get my hands on.
It’s the same feeling I had when I first discovered Tamara Allen and had to read every single word she’d ever written. :)