Search Worlds Without End

Choices at the End of the World

On the eve of the end of the world, 20 December 2012, five friends meet in Spanish Gardens, the cafe where they had celebrated their college graduation 20 years before. Over Irish coffees, they reminisce - and reveal long-held and disturbing secrets.

Each friend in turn is given a curious set of instructions by an enigmatic bartender named Ariel:

"Your life is filled with crossroads and you are free to choose one road or another at any time. Stepping through this door takes away all choices except two -- the choice to live a different life, or return to this one...."

Each in turn passes through the portal and are faced with new lives and challenges. Their decisions show a new life -- or something far worse. Ar the end of the world, it's a chance for redemption, or a chance to learn something about themselves.

International bestselling author, Alma Alexander, mixes a world or possibilities and paths. What if you could change the past -- go right instead of left, fall in love with a different person, change careers or families, or even change your sex. 2012 Midnight at Spanish Gardens brings those choices to life.

It's the Friday before a science fiction convention weekend. Hundreds of fans are lined up at the registration desk. The posters for the Media Guests of Honor aren't done, there's a problem with the Program Booklet, the Author Guest of Honor has gone AWOL, and the coffee in the Green Room is DREADFUL. The convention chair's boyfriend has just smashed up his car. And now the entire hotel has been kidnapped by time traveling androids, and taken for a quick jaunt around the Moon. At least something is going right.

Welcome to AbductiCon. This is a humorous and metaphysical science fiction story of fandom, the convention culture, and the treasured tropes of science fiction.

The Parada had been lost for almost two hundred years before they recovered the ship, drifting in stygian interstellar darkness, and brought her home again.

But that was not the miracle.

The miracle was that the crew was still alive.

That was also the problem.

Six crew members went out on the Parada, Earth's first starship. All contact was lost, and the ship vanished for almost two centuries. When the Parada's successor found the drifting ship and somehow managed to bring it home, the six crew members were not only still alive but barely older, due to the time dilation effects of near-FTL travel. Their return was a miracle - but it could not be revealed to the waiting world. The problem was, six individuals went out to the stars. More than seventy fractured personalities came back.

Psychologist Stella Froud and Jesuit Father Philip Carter were recruited as part of the team assembled to investigate the mystery, and to try and help the Parada's crew understand their condition and possibly reverse it. What they discovered was a deepening mystery, and very soon they found themselves forced to take sides in a conflict that nobody could have possibly predicted. Their world would never be the same again.

Her ex was Lucifer himself, and the devil still claimed a part of her soul. Her best friend turned out to be a selkie--sworn to protect her body. A vengeful, jealous rusalka was out for her blood. A taniwha, against the call of his conscience, would fight to save her life. On the run from supernatural enemies, racing against time to help friends torn from myth and legend, and trying to come to terms with the true identity of the man whom she had thought to be her soulmate... Sabrina Warne is about to find out that nothing she has ever believed has been true.

A sweeping epic set in medieval China; it is the story of a group of women, the Jin-Shei sisterhood, who form a uniquely powerful circle that transcends class and social custom.

They are bound together by a declaration of loyalty that transcends all other vows, even those with the gods, by their own secret language, passed from mother to daughter, by the knowledge that some of them will have to pay the ultimate sacrifice to enable others to fulfil their destiny.

The sisterhood we meet run from the Emperor's sister to the street-beggar, from the trainee warrior in the Emperor's Guard to the apprentice healer, from the artist to the traveller-girl, herself an illegitimate daughter of an emperor and seen as a threat to the throne. And as one of them becomes Dragon Empress, her determination to hold power against the sages of the temple, against the marauding forces from other kingdoms, drags the sisterhood into a dangerous world of court intrigue, plot and counterplot, and brings them into conflict with each other from which only the one who remains true to all the vows she made at the very beginning to the dying Princess Empress can rescue them.

An amazing and unusual book, based on some historical fact, full of drama, adventure and conflict like a Shakespearean history play, it's a novel about kinship and a society of women, of mysticism, jealousy, fate, destiny, all set in the wonderful, swirling background of medieval China.

Four hundred years after The Secrets of Jin-shei, the Syai Empire is on the brink of civil war. A new voice preaching equality promises hope for the downtrodden, but the ensuing people's revolution brings terror, reeducation camps, and death to anyone embracing the old ways.

An outsider and a child of two worlds, Amais searches for the magical bond of jin-shei, the women's oath, in her ancestral home of Syai, unaware that her quest will bring her to the very person who may destroy her and her family. And yet, she must face him, or all hope for Syai will be lost...

The life Anghara knows has ended; everyone she loved is dead or doomed. And now she must flee far from her home or die at the hands of her half-brother Sif. A defenseless child is adrift in an unfamiliar world, pursued by the minions of a false king whose brutality knows no bounds. But Anghara has a great destiny that reaches beyond the borders of the troubled realm she must one day rule -- and a miraculous gift to be awakened in secret and fortified in a distant desert land at once beautiful, mysterious, and perilous: an awesome and frightening power called Sight.

The child Anghara Kir Hama was forced to flee the kingdom she rightfully ruled, escaping the murderous wrath of her brother, the usurper, who would see her dead to secure the throne. But her years spent in a strange desert land -- honing the miraculous power called Sight -- have forever changed the young queen. And now it is time to claim what is hers.

But treachery greets Anghara upon her return to a realm suffering under the cruelty of the bloodthirsty tyrant Sif. In the dungeons of her enemy, she awaits an inevitable death, robbed of the gift that set her apart from all others. Yet those who have sworn to defend her will not rest until their cherished queen is safe, including one whose noble heart belongs to her alone. For young Anghara's remarkable destiny is greater than crowns and countries -- greater even than the fearsome Old Gods who must stand down to make way for the Changer of Days.

Great things have been expected of Thea, the seventh child of two seventh children, Now, with Cheveyo, a mage [of the Anasazi], Thea has begun to weave herself a new magical identity, infused with elements of the original worlds. But back home, THea keeps her abilities hidden and attends the Wandless Academy, the one school on Earth for those who have no apparent magical talent. It is there that Thea realizes that her enemies are hungrier and more dangerous than she knew. What's more, her greatest strength may be the powerlessness she has resisted for so long.

What do you get when ordinary e-mail spam becomes infused with magic? Spellspam--and it's not supposed to exist. As far as Thea and her friends know, computers are meant to be inert vehicles for storing magic spells, not magical processors themselves. But all that seems to have changed as students at Wandless Academy find themselves the victim of practical jokes--with magical consequences--simply by opening an e-mail.

Now the spellspams are getting worse, and it's possible there's someone behind them who is not just bent on stirring up trouble but has a much scarier and more wide-reaching agenda. Until now, Thea has been the only person she's ever met who can reach through the computer using magic. But someone else is out there, and even her friends can't help her track down the source of the spellspam before it gets much, much worse.

This sequel to Worldweavers: Gift of the Unmage ups the ante on a fantasy world that is rich and nuanced, like our own, but with a core of wildly original magic.

Thea returns to the Wandless Academy only to discover her friends are as out of sorts as she is. It's only when she discovers that she is an elemental mage--a mage so rare that only four other wizards in history had similar talents--that the pieces start falling in place.

Now Thea is called on by the Federal Bureau of Magic to unlock a mysterious white cube that may hold the secrets of more than just one elemental mage. However, the Alphiri are naturally curious and are looking to steal an elemental mage from the pages of history that could upset the balance between humans and Alphiri. The great Nicholas Tessla, a quad-elemental mage, has somehow survived death itself and both the Alphiri and the Federal Bureau of Magic are searching for him. But can Thea bring her friends together one more time to save Nicholas Tessla from being made a slave to the scheming Alphiri?