The Powers Alone: The First Principle

The Powers Series #1

by Mark Everett Stone

Two-thousand years ago, Rome fell to an ancient curse called the Scourge. It took the Collegium—a cabal of powerful wizards—to finally eradicate the menace. Two millennia of expansion and reconstruction saw humanity once again ascendant in the world while the Collegium faded from glory, slowly becoming a relic in the eyes of a society that thought it no longer needed them.

Sejanus Antius Macro, known as the wizard Diamondfang, is the embodiment of the First Principle of Magic, Ritual and Repetition. Armed with a certainty that the Scourge will return and uncertain whether the faded remains of the Collegium will be strong enough to drive it off, he and his comrades seek the heir to the greatest wizard of the Collegium, the One of All.

For centuries wizards have scoured the known world for The One but to no avail. Sejanus believes that his only recourse is to travel beyond the frontier to the lands of the savage red men, the people who have successfully resisted the Empire for four-hundred years. Armed with his raven familiar, Lucius, and centuries of experience, he undertakes a journey in an effort to save the empire he swore to protect. But can even a near-immortal wizard survive in a land from where the great Legions of Britannia never returned?

295 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 7, 2018

About the author

Born in Helsinki, Finland, Mark Everett Stone arrived in the U.S. at a young age and promptly dove into the world of the fantastic. Starting at age seven with the Iliad and the Odyssey, he went on to consume every scrap of Norse Mythology he could get his grubby little paws on. At age thirteen he graduated to Tolkien and Heinlein, building up a book collection that soon rivaled the local public library’s. In college Mark majored in Journalism and minored in English. Mark is feverishly working on his next book while his amazingly patient wife, Brandie, keeps him and their two sons, Aeden and Gabriel, in check.