Chained Hearts

Prologue Larry Witze spent the majority of his adult life as director of the Slave Sanctuary on the Chancellor’s Estate. His passion, however, was reading. He especially loved to read history books and had read enough of them to understand better than most how and why, centuries later, the world he knew had changed so much from the world of the past he read about. He was fascinated by the wars of the past. Wars that grew larger with every discovery of new lands and new people and were eventually fought on a massive global scale with such devastating weaponry that death could strike with the guiltless touch born of long distance. Back then, he’d read, it was commonly thought nuclear weapons, economic disaster, and widespread disease would be humanity’s downfall. Ironically, the fall, when it came, was not of human manufacture, but in the form of a natural disaster. The people in those written-about bygone times fought a different type of war than the one Larry Witze and others were currently fighting. Now, the geographic scope was far smaller, death was more intimate, more hands-on. The weapons of Larry Witze’s time were less massively destructive, but war was now fought with additional armaments that were the fodder of myth, magic, legend, and fairy tales. The society before wasn’t faced with an enemy wielding a supernatural arsenal. Nor did they possess the allies Larry Witze did, capable of equally powerful supernatural weaponry. Boundaries had been drawn. When West Caldera declared war on New Colorado over the rights to the Gulf Coast waterway, a motive for war as old as humanity itself had reared its ugly head. Fortunately, two extraordinary young men, each with unique and special gifts, some known and some as yet undiscovered, had crossed Witze’s path. In them, and those like them, Witze realized, lay hope for tomorrow. He couldn’t help but wonder what the history books would have to say about that.