Long ago Lord Huto abandoned the City of Masters to live as a hermit atop a nameless mountain Casting aside his royal lineage he also abandoned his mastery of sorcery leaving his brother to rule as Emperor of Yhorom Yet Huto could not abandon the Thousand Year Bond that extends his natural life by ten centuries Now some 350 years later an emissary from the great city brings news that Huto s brother has been murdered The chief suspect for this crime is the Emperor s own wife whose sorcery rivalled that of her husband Huto doesn t give a damn about politics but he comes down from his lonely mountain for one to expose and destroy his brother s killer However it s a long way back to Yhorom and dark forces conspire to ensure that the hermit prince never makes it home alive When rampaging soldiers destroy a small northern village Umi loses her mother and her people in a single day She flees into the depths of the Mossback Forest where dangers and wonders abound Adopted by a pack of wild forest spirits she learns the secrets of earth magic as well as how to track and kill those who despoil the forest One day she will leave behind the wilderness and its vengeful spirits to walk the Dragon Road which carries her all the way to ancient Yhorom where the Old Masters rule by the twin virtues of steel and sorcery The hermit prince and the daughter of spirits are destined to meetbut will it be as allies or enemies The answer to this question will change the course of history A Scaleborn Novel Times Never Change The SCALEBORN Series John R Fultz lives in the Bay Area California but is originally from Kentucky His fiction has appeared in Weird Tales Black Gate and Space Time as well as the comic book anthologies Zombie Tales and Cthulhu Tales His graphic novel of epic fantasy Primordia was published by Archaia Comics John s literary heroes include Tanith Lee Thomas Ligotti Clark Ashton Smith Lord Dunsany William Gibson Robert Silverberg and Darrell Schweitzer not to mention Howard Poe and Shakespeare When not writing stories novels or comics John teaches English Literature at the middle high school level and plays a mean guitar In a previous life he made his living as a wandering storyteller on the lost continent of Atlantis. There are many ways to write a sequel and many ways to tell an epic story IMMACULATE SCOUNDRELS the first SCALEBORN NOVEL was a rogues eye view of a new world a very in your face Wuxia meets Western meets 80s Sword Sorcery film that only in its final chapter drew back the curtain on a larger vista In TIMES NEVER CHANGE Fultz begins to show what lies across those vistas the machinations of Empire and of the mysterious Empress who depending on whom one asks is either a murdering usurper or fierce defender of her dead husband s throne and a joint vision they shared To weave this tale we leave the doughty crew we met in SCOUNDRELS behind and instead step right into the world of the imperial court and the mysterious Empress herself both as she is now and whom she was decades earlier In these juxtapositions we learn the Empress has been a peasant a changeling a merchant prince an assassin a stepmother to two Scaleborn foundlings and the architect of a plan so bold it shouldn t be revealed in a book review Meanwhile a rival party determined to see the Empress overthrown arrive at distant mountain hermitage where a near immortal monk has spent centuries meditating an all but living statue Rousing the monk from his trance we learn he is the dead Emperor s young brother a master warrior and sorcerer who has renounced magic a figure of great virtue and great tragedy haunted by some past deed that his long meditations have not let him escape But now he is needed to avenge his brother and save the realm or so he is told. As these two giants move into an inevitable clash we move back and forth the timeline and and of the history of the Scaleborn the human sorcerers who conquered and enslaved them and the Empire that rules them are revealed This is epic stuff yet packed into a slim novel and told again with the intensity of Western or wuxia If there was a fair bit of Peckinpah and the 60s gritty western told through a Tarantino style lens in SCOUNDRELS TIMES NEVER CHANGE is UNFORGIVEN meets CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON That s a big shift and the fact that it works almost perfectly is a big credit to Fultz as writer and of course saying your prose can channel the stylings of Peckinpah Tarantino Eastwood and Lee all in one series and create a thematic whole is nothing to dismiss This is a complex robust world and it is the world and the Scaleborn as a people who are the characters it is obvious the author knows exactly what he is about in its unfolding and I m in for the journey Kindle Edition