"The Iron Ring"

On the day Auston Habershaw was born, Skylab fell from the heavens. This foretold two possible fates: supervillain or scifi/fantasy author. Fortunately he chose the latter, and spends his time imagining the could-be and the never-was rather than disintegrating the moon with his volcano laser. He lives and works in Boston, MA.

Habershaw applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Iron Ring: Part I of the Saga of the Redeemed, and reported the following:

Page 69 in The Iron Ring (or as close as I can figure it for an e-book) finds the reader in an interstitial scene showing the Mage Defender, Myreon Alafarr, pressing her case to pursue the archvillain, Tyvian Reldamar. At this point, our characters have just survived one major confrontation and are now setting up to hurtle towards another. Here’s we’ve got a little bit of world-building as Myreon stares up at a statue of Finn Cadogan in the courtyard of the Thostering Academy—a training school for professional mercenaries:

Myreon looked up at one of the four great heroes of the age… She knew that Master Defender Tarlyth as well as some of the older Sergeant Defenders in Galaspin Tower had served alongside Cadogan’s ‘Iron Men’ in Illin. When they spoke of him, it was only to say he was a soldier of integrity and steadfast courage.

“I know what you’re thinking.” Tarlyth said, grinning up at the statue. “That it was all a myth. That we old men have cooked up stories about Cadogan and Varner and Marik the Holy and Perwynnon and the rest.”

Myreon sighed, but didn’t say anything.

The world is full of myths, many of which we buy into every day without thinking about it. We idolize the past, we glorify the future, we lie about ourselves to ourselves. What page 69 hints at is how pervasive these myths are and how they are both constructive and destructive. Lying, after all, has it’s good points.

Would a person read past this page? I would hope so—we’re on our way somewhere right now, and I’m just about to introduce a pretty seedy bounty hunter. This is a moment of introspection strung between moments of excitement and adventure. This is an effect I work very hard to create in The Iron Ring, because I think explorations of morality and truth are only made better when spliced in with swordfights, derring-do, and man-eating monsters.

Visit Auston Habershaw's website.

--Marshal Zeringue