Heart of the Messenger: Book One of the Falcon Chronicles

Erina loved listening to her Uncle Bower's stories, even now when she was only eight hafmons from adulthood. She loved the excitement, the adventure, the magic and the heroes, where good always conquered evil and the damsel was always rescued by the dashing knight. She was also certain none of those things would ever happen to her, safely trapped as she was in her quiet village life. She had no idea that every five thousand turings one person was required to save the world from decent into an eon of cruelty and suffering at the hands of the Shadis. Nor that she could be forced to take on such a perilous journey to the Isle of Cloud, where good and evil are not so easily identified, and where legends and monsters leap from their fairytales to become sword-wieldingly larger than life. The trigger in those tales was always by the arrival of a mythical creature, like a white unicorn, which Erina saw this morning...