Tag: The Symphony of Ages

Acclaimed author Elizabeth Haydon returns with a heartbreaking tale of love and valor in The Hollow Queen, the eighth installment of her USA Today bestselling Symphony of Ages series that began with Rhapsody, publishing June 30th.

CHAPTER ONE: THE FORGES, YLORC

The ring of steel against anvil was always a lovely percussion line for a song, and Sergeant-Major Grunthor was in the mood for singing as he pounded away, shaping the new pick hammer he was making.

The fires of the ancient forges of Canrif, designed and built a millennium and a half before by Gwylliam the Visionary, splashed light over the enormous smithy, adding a dance of shadows to the heat and smell of the place, increasing the Sergeant’s already considerable pleasure. Gwylliam, an ancient king he had never met, was a genuine anus of a human being in Grunthor’s estimation, but an undeniable genius at smithing and architecture. Therefore he thought it only right and fitting to shape his newest song in tribute to the long-dead inventor, whose mummified remains he and his comrades had come upon a few years before, splayed out on a table that was hidden away in the vault of a secret library in the bowels of the citadel the man had literally carved out of a mountain range in what now was the kingdom of the Firbolg, known as Ylorc.

Grunthor threw back his head between swings of the forge hammer and let his glorious bass, often a few notes flat, fill the high-ceilinged chamber with song.

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