A Song for Ristfand. Dawnbringer: Lightborn, #2

Following on the events of the first volume, the catalyst of which now becomes a consuming conflagration, the War of Darkness begins in earnest. And in the shadow of the forces here revealed, the tension of the civil war and the threat of the power-hungry Empire pales almost into insignificance. Light and darkness are laid bare in their true nature, though one is frail and faltering, weak and vulnerable, while the other appears all but invincible and uncontainable.
But they lie hidden in every heart. Thus suspicions and fears arise even among those who stand to fight the encroaching forces; but so, too, capacities for love and heroism are also stirred into flame in the most humble and hidden hearts, summoning them forth to answer the desperate cries of a civilization on the brink of chaos, conflict, and even collapse. Lightborn is the centerpiece of the Dawnbringer series of novels in the world of Irándiel, upon the small continent of Telmérion, cold and rugged and yet inhabited since the beginning of human history by the first family of humankind.
Though the setting is high fantasy-a work of co-creative imagination fashioning a mythical world with its own history and geography-the plot and the ins-and-outs of the world are deeply realistic, portraying as it were an ancient and long-forgotten past of our own world. Or more precisely, what is offered here is a mythical exposition of the true past that we all share-with very little magic or other fantasy tropes, but with a great deal of "magic, " in other words, a world filled with wonders and terrors of all kinds, from the ancient guardians of the world, the Anaíon, to vicious and deadly beasts such as dragons, eötenga, and vru'ádach.
The characters thus find themselves caught in the cosmic battle between light and darkness, between the weakness of love and the power of hate, which casts its rays and its shadows also into the heart of every man and woman. The journey marked out before their feet calls for integrity, fidelity, and heroism, and also something more, something that lies at the heart of every good adventure and every life, and which is the very measure of man.