GUARDIAN
By Thomas F. Monteleone
Digital edition published by Crossroad Press
Copyright 2013 / Thomas F. Monteleone
Copy-edited by: Anita Lorene Smith
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
Tom Monteleone has been a professional writer since 1972, and four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. He has published more than 100 short stories in numerous magazines and anthologies. His stories have been nominated for many awards, and have appeared in lots of best-of-the-year compilations. He is the editor of seven anthologies, including the highly acclaimed Borderlands series edited with his wife, Elizabeth. Borderlands 5 won a Bram Stoker Award in 2003.
He has written for the stage and television, having scripts produced for American Playhouse (which won him the Bronze Award at the International TV and Film Festival of New York and the Gabriel Award), George A. Romero’s Tales from the Darkside, and a series on Fox TV entitled Night Visions.
Of his thirty-six books, his novel, The Blood of the Lamb received the 1993 Bram Stoker Award, and The New York Times Notable Book of the Year Award. His four collections of selected short fiction are Dark Stars and Other Illuminations, Rough Beasts and Other Mutations, The Little Brown Book of Bizarre Stories, and Fearful Symmetries (2004), which won the 2004 Bram Stoker Award. His novels, The Resurrectionist and Night of Broken Souls, global thrillers from Warner Books, received rave reviews and have been optioned for films. His omnibus volume of essays about the book and film industries entitled The Mothers And Fathers Italian Association was published by Borderlands Press (www.borderlandspress.com) and won the 2003 Bram Stoker Award for Non-Fiction. He is also the author of the bestseller, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Novel. His books and stories have been translated into twelve foreign languages.
Book List
Novels
Between Floors
Eyes of the Virgin
Fantasma
Guardian
Lyrica: A Novel of Horror and Desire
Night of Broken Souls
Night Things
Night Train
Ozymandias
Seeds of Change
Serpentine
The Blood of the Lamb
The Crooked House
The Magnificent Gallery
The Reckoning
The Resurrectionist
The Secret Sea
The Time Connection
The Time-Swept City
Collections
Dark Stars and Other Illuminations
Fearful Symmetries
Rough Beasts and Other Mutations
The Little Brown Book of Bizarre Stories
Borderlands series
Borderlands
Borderlands 2
Borderlands 3
Borderlands 4
Borderlands 5
Dragonstar series
Day of the Dragonstar
Night of the Dragonstar
Dragonstar Destiny
Non-Fiction
The Arts and Beyond: Visions of Man’s Aesthetic Future
The Mothers and Fathers Italian Association
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Novel
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GUARDIAN
This is for ROGER ZELAZNY,
Creator of worlds.
It can also be found in the very ancient murmurings of the ancients of even the First Age that there was a bird-thing called the Feeniks. It was a creature which was immortal—dying in a burst of flame, then rising up from its own ashes to live again. So say the writings of Garon and Deldayna of Cairn; it also appears as an analog to the prophecies of Narin, who told of the rebirth of the killer of the Riken. Perhaps the world still waits for that mighty one’s return.
—MONOLOGUES OF POULE VI
Yet it is still difficult to accept that the Earth once flowered like the thickest forest of the Scorpinnian, even into the regions of the Manteg Depression. There were men walking the Earth in those days who were different from ourselves. If you ask how this can be, I can only say that they were different in spirit rather than the flesh, but how it can be so, I sadly do not know. As my proof I have only the testament of their machines and the still unturned stones of their once great cities. It is true that we find none of their bones and there are colleagues of mine who say that any bones would have long ago turned to dust. But I disagree.
I fear that they have gone, those great men, to another place. I fear that they have left this world, cleaning up their mess behind them, sealing off any entry to their world, wherever it might now be. For if they were as wise and powerful as I imagine, they most likely saw our “rise” to civilization, and vowed that we would never follow them.
—MANNEN’S The Perversion
There is an aspect of death which suggests the infinite, the never-ending, because there will always be death, and Death. The reality of the former, the concept of the latter. And, since there is much now to suggest a never-ending cycle of existence, the world must depend upon death as the catalyst, the prime mover, to ensure a continuation of the cycle.
Thus are we not concerned with the deaths of men—who are by nature insubstantial and generally contemptible—but with the deaths of ideas. For it is the ideas which live and give breath to the future generations, the future eons.
Concern, sadly, is not enough, and the wars continue. The unrest and the petty scratchings of men for power and control continue to poison the earth. It is like a foulness which stains so deeply, spreads so relentlessly, that there is no preventing it. As long as there are men—and it seems that that is part of the curse, i.e., there always will be—there will be the terrible fighting, the maiming death, and purging fires.
—FRAGMENT OF A FIRST AGE MANUSCRIPT
The Great Library at Voluspa
PROLOGUE
There has been a recent period of peace in the World. The temptation exists to say there has also been prosperity, but this would
