OF STAVES AND SIGMAS is a transworld phantasy tale that follows psychiatric patient James Wagner's mystically compelled break from contemporary earth to mediaevalesque Ergos, where through long and unremitting ordeal he is forced to consider the inconceivable: that his lifelong madness was less a psychological sickness than it was a visional prelude to the astonishingly palpable reality that has suddenly supplanted his earthly existence. Marooned on a backwater world of warring, of brutality and bondage and bloodshed, a world of multifarious creatures both human and bestial, it will take every bit of Wagner's courage, cunning, and perseverance to find his way, to find his freedom, and ultimately to find himself.

The Series:

The SOULS OF ERGOS saga is a sinuous, multi-layered tale centred around two men, two worlds, and a bizarre twist of cosmic duality. Both men rousted by Fate, both displaced by undeflectable circumstance onto foreign spheres, each finds himself striving to remain grounded amid the peril of unfamiliar terrains and hostile peoples while simultaneously trying to unriddle the mystery behind their intersidereal abductions. With one protagonist stranded on contemporary earth, and the other on mediaeval Ergos, their respective existences come down to an ability to brave the travels and travails born of faithworthy comrades, of treacherous situations, and of the handful of gradually-manifesting mystical abilities that threaten to make both men unwillingly unique to their surrogate worlds.

The Characters:

James Wagner (a.k.a. Voknor): Long-troubled earth man mystically ushered to the mediaevalesque world of Ergos, where he is forcibly integrated into a culture steeped in warfare, slavery, and aggressively deadly penchants. A previously thoughtful man, now vexed by an unwieldy and unpredictable violent streak—as well as by a suddenly haphazard and inexplicable ability to augment the biological healing process in himself and in others—he must learn to temper and disguise his newfound proclivities while acclimating himself to the potentially lethal conventions of an archaic and highly superstitious society.

Miracle: The strapping healer/shaman of dubious origin who, having amassed a growing grass-roots movement in the American southwest, suddenly abandons his ministry in order to travel cross-country and seek out the distrait Wagner on the eve of his cosmic shanghaiing. Armed with esoteric knowledge and an abrasive attitude—and claiming past ties to Wagner—Miracle seems to be the only being capable of not only preparing Wagner for his ordeal to come, but of actually possessing the wherewithal for wresting his essence back from the brink of otherworldly influence.

J'nea of Bejodeth: The saucy Ergosian prison trusty with smaragdine eyes and fiery disposition, who carries the brand of her past sins upon her right cheek. Moody, critical, and headstrong with her peers, she's alternately ancillary and nurturing to the weak and the wanting; and with her own duality a seeming complement to Wagner's, the pair are drawn into a highly tempestuous friendship/rivalry that proves useful and indispensable to both.

Magdalena Escalante: Youthful activist, ardent protestor, concerned citizen, charming non-conformist, Maggie is on a mission to revamp religion in America, to take it back to its pre-institutionalised roots—and Miracle is her vehicle for doing so. Little does she know that James Wagner's trials will inadvertently interrupt her plans and whisk her—and Miracle—toward other, more mind-blowing, ends.

Balgor, Son of the Realm: Self-proclaimed bastard and hearty Ergosian fighting man, Balgor encounters the newly-captured Wagner as a fellow captive in a NuRac gladiator prison. Enjoined by GrumTor, the NuRac Slavemaster, to train and prepare the callow newcomer for the arena games, the realmson has no notion of how influential his unfledged charge will become—not only to his own livelihood, but to the fates and futurity of every inmate in the camp.

Tamek, Sentinel of Vishkor: As a high-ranking Ergosian religious hero, Tamek is valued and vaunted by his NuRac captors who use his imprisoned status as a symbol of the conquered Ergosian race. Even so, he remains a spiritual patriarch to his people; and, to Wagner, he becomes both an advisor and an abettor in Wagner's many machinations to regain his freedom.

Jonathon R. Mazzio, M.D.: Head Psychiatrist and Director of the Howsley Centre for Mental Health in Bishop, Indiana, who takes a vehement interest in James Wagner's pre-phase case. Perplexed by Wagner's earliest symptomatology, utterly floored by its unstoppable veer into medical and physical impossibility, Dr. Mazzio must ultimately let go of science and rationale if he is to save his patient from the phenomenon that has usurped his body, his personality, and his very life.

Papa Olask: The oldest and longest held Ergosian prisoner in QieLahr, the NuRac prison/gladiator camp. A self-apprenticed apothecary and man of physic, Olask is the head ministrant in the most primitive of surgeries, where he tirelessly tends to his fellow inmates under the most squalid and blood-riddled circumstances imaginable. A practical man and a true altruist, he has no notion of the unwilling earthly thaumaturge suddenly in his midst, and no ken of what it will mean to him to have Wagner's secret assistance.

Skol the Sunderer: Legendary terror of QieLahr's Great Arena, to face the daemonic Skol in the ring is nothing short of a death sentence. No one has ever survived a bout with him, and as such, no Ergosian really knows anything of his true outward hideousness but for a few whispered descriptions slipped by those Ergosian trusties who have risked to glance into the beast's subterranean cell. Skol's lethality on the field of battle, however, is widely known and hugely feared.

The Vofspar Warrior: The feral, felid she-beast whose chanced encounter with Wagner results in a violent and unpromising outcome for both. She, of the most vicious race of blood-hungry werecats, and he, a pink, hairless, comparatively frail human—in flight and in capture they seem to share a common link in a long chain of misfortune and misery. But is it just one link? Or are their destinies intertwined in other, more inexplicable ways?

$18.95
Paperback, 6x9
ISBN: 978-159858-292-5
496 pages

An Uncommon Fantasy Adventure with a Literary Flair!