Songs from the Seashell Archives

Colin Songsmith sings a song to an old witch, who takes an unlikely revenge. The witch's granddaughter rescues him from the dire threat of being, eaten alive by the cat. She hears the song, which happens to concern her recently married sister and a gypsy. Convinced that she has to save her sister, she takes the minstrel, the cat, and her magical resources to Rowan Castle. The story is rich with descriptive details of setting and encounters with magical and fantastic creatures such as a talking cat, a lovesick dragon, and a bear prince. The characters speak in contemporary slang, which plays nicely against the traditional fantastic settings.

Progress has transformed Queenston, capital city of Argonia. Once the land of witches, wizards, fairies, and other magical people and animals, since the Great War, the country has changed. Queenston, particularly, is now the city of contraptions and conveyances, including a modern international railroad.* n the Great War Argonia's dragons allied with the armies to push back an invasion. For their assistance, the beasts shared what food remained as the country rebuilt itself. But, with the war won, the allies came to "recover" the war-torn country, bringing with them new ideas and inventions, most of which only needed a supply of iron and a reliable source of heat for their boilers. The dragons were again, recruited, tamed, altered, and virtually enslaved, to power Progress. Verity Brown is a modern girl. The magic of her witchy foremothers has become, if not actually illegal, highly unfashionable. The only magic that matters to Verity is her own curse, forcing her to know and tell the truth regardless of convenience. On Verity's 16th birthday, a hot-air balloon crash kills her father. The balloon's dragon and wrangler rescue Verity, but are blamed and sentenced, to be put to death. Her honorable quest to save them and find her father's murderer takes her straight into the den of the wild and ferocious Dragon Vitia.

Queen Verity is queen only because her mother has said she has to be. She agrees because, after all, somebody has to liberate the dragons, who have long toiled in the boiler room bowels of the city. Now that they are free, nobody has any idea what to do with them or how to feed them. Everyone is used to dragons being docile cogs in the machinery of industry, tamed into tranquility by food treated with a hypnotic tranquilizer, now largely destroyed, leaving a lot of huge hungry beasts roving the capital city of Queenston. Verity needs to act fast, before the dragons remember what dragons once, did to feed themselves. The crown has scarcely mussed her hair before her political enemies have her shanghaied and sold to an outward-bound vessel, leaving the kingdom to the random mercies of her erstwhile assistant, Malady Hyde.

The six-volume set of the Songs From the Seashell Archives, all together as one volume! Magic, Dragons, Unicorns, Dastardly villains and more! Songs of the Seashell Archives is a six book collection of some of the finest fantasy writing you'll ever read. Includes Song of Sorcery; The Unicorn Creed; Bronwyn's Bane; The Christening Quest; The Dragon, The Witch, and the Railroad; and The Redundant Dragons.