Hammerfall
Chapter One
Imagine first a web of stars. Imagine it spread wide and wider. Ships shuttle across it. Information flows.
A star lies at the heart of this web, its center, heart, and mind.
This is the Commonwealth.
Imagine then a single strand of stars in a vast darkness, a beckoning pathway away from the web, a path down which ships can travel.
Beyond lies a treasure, a small lake of G5 suns, a near circle of perfect stars all in reach of one another.
This way, that strand says. After so hard a voyage, reward. Wealth. Resources.
But a whisper comes back down that thread of stars, a ghost of a whisper, an illusion of a whisper.
The web of stars has heard the like before. Others are out there, very far, very faint, irrelevant to our affairs.
Should we have listened?
-- The Book of the Landing.
Distance deceived the eye in the Lakht, that wide, red land of the First Descended, where legend said the ships had come down.
At high noon, with the sun reflecting off the plateau, the chimera of a city floated in the haze, appearing as a line of light just below ... read full excerpt from Hammerfall ebook
