The Runelords

Hello people's today I'm writing about a book I read recently. Here it goes.

It's the first book in the fantasy series called Runelords titled The Sum of All Men. The plot is centered around the Wolf Lord Raj Ahten invading the northern kingdoms of Rofehaven. There are two different forms of magic in this series. Normal people can use magic with runes. The rune process is taking a forcible made of blood iron and giving an attribute, or endowment to another. The endowments are stamina, metabolism, brawn, wit, grace, voice, hearing, touch, and smell. You cannot be physically forced to give an endowment but you can be blackmailed into willingly giving one such as your family being threatened. When an endowment is given the dedicate loses all they had so for instance if you gave brawn you would be extremely weak, or if you gave grace you would always be extremely cramped and stiff, meanwhile the person they gave it to would have twice as much brawn or grace.

Since blood iron is so rare and expensive most the time only nobles receive endowments and in return for giving an endowment you are protected and cared for by the runelord for the rest of your life in a fortress the Runelord owns called the dedicates keep. As a runelord it is your responsibility to protect your people and your dedicates even if it would mean your death so these endowments are often used on the field of war with a heavily endowed Runelord leading an army with soldiers and horses with endowments called force soldiers and force horses. This is a major difference from real medieval battles because in real battles the ruler would have very little power but in this a heavily endowed Runelord could be the deciding factor in a battle.

The second type of magic is elemental powers. Only wizards can harness one of the four powers, fire, earth, water, and air but normal people can be said to "serve" a power. For instance Raj Ahten serves fire because fire is currently a destructive power and he is an extremely, extremely evil person and has several flame weavers, or fire wizards, in his army. Raj Ahten has hundreds of thousands of endowments and is a force of nature on the battlefield. In legend there is a man named Daylan Hammer that took so many endowments in order to repel an invading force that eventually he no longer needed his dedicated to stay alive in order to keep the endowments and he stopped aging. He became an immortal and after he disappeared he became known as The Sum of All Men. Raj Ahten has taken many endowments of metabolism which makes him several times faster than a normal man but also makes him age much faster. His other endowments will make sure he stays equally as powerful throughout the rest of his life but he will still die of old age in three years so his insane goal is to collect enough endowments to become The Sum of All Men and conquer the world.

The Runelords series is extremely intense, harsh, and action packed. It has all the harsh reality and intensity of medieval realistic fiction with a lot of magic and fantasy elements. Bye.


- By Ashton