I finished writing my first book in 2002. It was envisaged as the first volume in a series of four that were set in the fantasy world that my wife and I created while working on a comic. The main characters were also borrowed from the comic - Ernest the mischievous elf, Kayla the brave warrior, Melkor the fearsome dragon and Marvin the mysterious and awe-inspiring wizard. The storyline was loosely based on the comic and was essentially about the protagonists' struggle against forces of evil that threatened to engulf their world and end their way of life. Looking back, it was a typical storyline for this genre.

The work on the second novel was interrupted in 2004. I was busy with a fundamental revision of my belief system at this time and it was spilling over into my writing. The work of fantasy was increasingly beginning to resemble a spiritual quest, so much so that I had to put it aside to express the spiritual ideas in a separate book - A Glimpse of Another World - before coming back to this one.

When I did return to the fantasy saga, I couldn't resume from where I'd left off. I no longer agreed with its message. My views had shifted. Eventually I did find a way to breathe new life into it, but in a radically different form from the original concept.

This book is a product of the above process. It retains many of the races and characters that were featured in the original, but it dispenses with some that have no clear place in the revised story while introducing others. The saga was condensed into a single volume as I felt that I could get the message across without having to construct a world as elaborate as that of The Lord of the Rings and some other works from the genre.

The writing style also took an interesting, and hopefully appealing, turn. Rather than tell the story in chronological order with the use of an occasional flashback, I decided to write it without a clear sense of the flow of time. Instead, the story follows the development of its main character (Marvin) by presenting events that shaped his person - so that the reader can get a good sense of his growth and maturation - without being overly concerned with the order in which they happened.

In the end, I hope that readers both enjoy the fictional nature of the work and are stimulated to a deeper examination of its core themes.