Indie Book Reviews and Recommendations
Top 5 Wednesday's prompt today is Fitness and Training Regimens. In fantasy/adventure type fiction, I swear some of these characters have lethal skills and would probably be elite athletes. So, how did they learn their skills and how much effort went into it? These are characters that I would like to see their fitness/training routines.
Bannen and Rena have lived with Mary, the Void Mage, for the last 2 years, training and learning more about each other. But now, they are ready to go out into the world on their own, taking on their own jobs and moving into their own house. They do this by taking on the individual shards of Toh'sellor, until the MISD decides to offer a temporary contract to work for them. Bannen and Rena team up with a pair of agents, basically their mirror images, and fight alongside them, ridding the world of pieces of Toh'sellor, one shard at a time. But it's not long before they realize that they'll have to go after the real deal if they have any chance of keeping the world safe from its chaos. Can Rena's magic defeat the biggest threat the world has ever faced? Can Bannen keep her safe while she tries?
Basically, this story is about a 19-year-old boy (sorry, MAN) who is summoned by a 16-year old girl/apprentice mage to have as her familiar. It just so happens that mages are not allowed to have humans as their familiars--slavery and all that jazz--and so Renata (aka Rena) and Bannen are forced to await a decision by the Mage Council about what to do with their familiar bond. In the meantime, Bannen acts as her stand-in familiar, following her on jobs, her training, and learning all about this girl and unfamiliar country (because, by the way, he was summoned from 2 continents over). As they spend more and more time together, their familiar bond strengthens as does their friendship. Bannen also becomes privy to just how strange Rena is in the magical world, as her magic has a tendency to deconstruct, whereas all other magic constructs. To top it all off, Rena is afflicted with a mysterious illness that neither magic nor science has any explanation for, let alone any hope for a cure. Do Bannen and Rena get to keep their familiar bond intact? Do they both even want to keep it?
The Book Dragon 
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