Yes, this is Fantasy. Yes I missed Friday. It’s been a week and I didn’t have a chance to write the post ahead of time and schedule it for Friday, like I usually do. But as I think I still have about 6 months worth of Fantasy Friday posts to make, I didn’t want to just skip this week.

I’ve been making these Fantasy Friday posts in the order of when I first read the book or started the series, even if I’ve been buying my own copies of the books more recently. These next several though, I know were all in the same few years (1995 – 2001), but the order of them is beyond my powers of recollection. So you’re going to get them in a fairly random order.

First up, because it was handy on my bookshelf, is Deverry by Katharine Kerr. This is a 4 book series (tetralogy) that is a complete story within the series itself, but is the start of larger series, made up of 4 series in total: three tetralogies and one trilogy. I think I read at least half of the second series, before being caught out waiting for more to become available at the library, and then forgot to continue.

Deverry is a series about reincarnation and fate. Once, long ago, a young man made a poor decision. In doing so, he changed his fate, and that of others, with consequences that would last through generations, as he waits and tries to right the course as those who’s lives are linked with his are born again. The series changes between present day, and events in the previous lives. I found it fascinating. This series has been sitting forgotten on my bookshelves for the last two decades, but I have had an increasing urge to reread it since “finding” it again a few years ago, and carry on with the later, linked, series which I have been slowly collecting.

Enter a fantastical world where even death itself is cowed by the powers of passion and high magic.

In a void outside reality, the flickering spirit of a young girl hovers between incarnations, knowing neither her past nor her future. But in the temporal world there is one who knows and waits: Nevyn, the wandering sorcerer. On a bloody day long ago he relinquished the maiden’s hand in marriage – and so forged a terrible bond of destiny between three souls that would last through three generations. Now Nevyn is doomed to follow them across the plains of time, never resting until he atones for the tragic wrong of his youth.

Don’t be fooled by the mention of not marrying the maiden – it is much larger than that, where the choice to abandon her has significant repercussions.