The Very Beginning

I never intended to become a novelist, but a throwaway line started me writing. This was the first page of the first story I wrote as an adult and I cringe a bit when reading it now. The book was published in summer 2000 with the title - The Forging of the Sword. It has recently been re-launched nationally across the UK with a stunning new jacket and in Germany, published by Random House Books.

PROLOGUE

Demarr stumbled, bone weary. The end of another day of hard walking over the forbidding terrain of the Terachim wastes was drawing near. The attack came without warning, a huge shape lunging out of the rapidly lengthening shadows. It was the loose rock that saved him in that initial instant. Even as Demarr stumbled, he sensed the movement in his peripheral vision and rolled into the mis-step, drawing his sword as he fell. The creature’s jaws snapped closed on empty air a split second behind him.

Adrenalin slammed into his system as Demarr rolled into a fighting crouch, all tiredness forgotten and survival instincts taking over. Whatever the beast is, it’s big and it’s damned fast, he thought.

The low cliffs loomed unnaturally large in the half-light of dusk as the sun, sinking blood red into the desert, played its daily game with the shadows. Out of a large crack in the cliff face the massive head arrowed down on its long, heavily scaled neck. Demarr dived to the right, again narrowly escaping death as the vicious teeth clashed terrifyingly close by.

What the hell is that thing? he wondered, as he scrambled for cover into a line of rocks.

Shrugging off his pack, Demarr ventured a glance around the large rock behind which he had taken refuge. At first he could see nothing, the inky black fissure cloaking the creature in darkness. Then, with a slight clatter of disturbed stone, his attacker stepped into the open.




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