Darkrange

The time: perhaps eight hundred years after a cataclysmic interruption of the earth's rotation; a cosmic stumble that came near to wiping man and all of his doings from the face of the earth. The near-savage, sword-wielding descendants of the few survivors of that conflagration now inhabit a land that is clean, primal and beautiful, beautiful, except for one vast and mysterious tract known to all people of the world as the DARKRANGE. None may enter the Darkrange, for legend speaks of it as a place of the beforeones; the very domain of the devil himself. Now, while on a seasonal herb-gathering, a Doctor-woman has been stolen, and Odd, the premier battleman of the Ussen people of Shadowhill-grange, is selected to fetch her back. The trail of her abductors leads into the Darkrange. Odd follows, for he lives in an age of courage and honor, and can do no less. There, beyond the forbidden fringes and within the unworldly, moss-hung depths of the Darkrange, he learns the truth of the world, his people and begins to fathom his own terrible legacy.