This Is One Blade I Gladly Threw Myself On – The Last Blade: The Verses of Vrelenden, Book Two by Beau Schemery

It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies. But it takes a great deal more to stand up to your friends. – JK Rowling.

Sometimes the most heroic thing a man can do is to follow his conscience, especially in the face of opposition from those he’s come to call friends. Ren the Resilient, True Hero, slayer of Grimthorn, defender of Unicorns, wielder of fire and ice, learns this truth firsthand on a Quest that will lead him and the Prince of Toads on a journey across the country of Vrelenden to stop an Emperor and thwart the rise of a Zombie Nation bent upon the destruction of every living thing in the world.

Ren is missing Celestrian, his Lost Unicorn and True Love, so it’s up to Ren, the Prince, and a new band of heroes they’ll assemble along the way to carry out this deadly…or maybe that should be undeadly mission. Every hero needs a Mage by his side, or so all the stories say, so as Ren is no ordinary hero that merely means he needs an extraordinary Mage to accompany him in this journey, one Discimus Verilicus Baernfordica Lam’ Derilithen Marviticus the Thirty-Third (it’s Dish, for short, thank goodness), the Mage Prime of Calistrothal. On their adventure, they will add to their numbers a Warrior Chief, Jaron A-Dale; Setsuo-No-Anbu, an Assassin; and the Elfin Healer, Acorn, who is prey to a danger all her own.

Danger—yes, there’s danger at nearly every turn of this Herculean adventure, as well as bad omens and revenge and detours and blessings in disguise, and, at the heart of it all, there’s an evil that refuses to remain vanquished. There’s magic and mystery and mayhem galore among the humor that becomes horror for one sleepy little town. There is love, too, not the sort of True Love that Ren has for his Lost Unicorn, but a love that is born of friendship and forged by a common need and is powerful in its own right.

The Unlikely Hero introduced this wide world of the extraordinary in a flexing of uncommonly creative muscle, through storytelling that blends together nearly every fantastical creature known to lovers of fantasy, along with plenty of action and romance and humor and a few nods to the classics—and not just literary classics either—to fulfill anyone’s love of reading about times and places that exist nowhere but in the imagination.

The Last Blade is a continuation of the magical enchantment I willingly threw myself into in the beginning of Ren’s journey to become a True Hero, and this Quest was every bit as wonderful as the first, leaving the reader with the promise of more to come as friends, both old and new, carry on to wherever Beau Schemery will take them next.

The Last Blade: The Verses of Vrelenden, Book Two can be purchased here: