The Thesal The Mank

Maledom Vampire. Dmitri has wandered the world for forty years, seducing women to feed his secrat’s need for blood. His venom gives women pleasure in exchange for what he requires. Like all thesals, Dmitri is plagued by his secrat’s tortured dreams of tall black gates and beautiful women with dark hair and eyes so light they are almost white. Dmitri’s secrat urges him into the vast, uncharted forest of the north. Risking starvation on animal blood, Dmitri travels for weeks, finally arriving through an underground passage to a mysterious island surrounded by a lake. There, he meets and seduces Aria – beautiful, nocturnal, and very like the women from his secrat’s dreams. Her people are the Mank, who were driven out of their city generations ago by the Cotsul, who still keep them prisoners. Dmitri resolves to help them, but he can’t defend the village during daylight hours. It’s forty-three days before the Veshtan Guard can arrive, and Aria is locked inside the village gates. Those gates must hold, but unknown to Dmitri, the Cotsul have a secret way in.

A SciFi Fantasy Tale. Attacking the Usur’s forces, Shep-Alij, the ruthless Maeser of the Resistance, captures Maeva. She is the Usur’s daughter and the last vanata, a hybrid species. She’s “the only vanata left in the world. Those gold rings in her eyes prove it. And the usur’s daughter had golded, which meant she’d found a mate. But she wasn’t fully golded. She hadn’t screwed him yet. Shep looked at her again. They’d gotten to her just in time. If she’d mated with some usur officer, the war would have been over for the resistance right there. They couldn’t sustain their fight through the reign of a new usur. They would lose.” Maeve’s death will be the key to winning the war and freeing Shep’s people from a decade of oppression. But when Shep delays executing her and takes her to a secure location to find out for whom she has golded, he finds it more and more difficult to carry out his plans. He’ll face a choice between loyalty to his cause and his growing feelings for Maeve.

For three hundred years, the men of The Fifty have sworn to sacrifice themselves to defend the border of Calthus from their enemies. Hawthe, the high-ranking military officer of The Fifty, is patrolling when he finds a strange, small animal in a smuggler’s wagon. It is injured, with cruel clamps piercing its shoulders so it can’t fly. He helps the animal and brings it back to Anwen Citadel, where his men adopt the creature. The animal lives with them for a year, becoming a part of the lives of the soldiers who live in the Citadel. One day, an eagle attacks the animal. When Hawthe catches up with the eagle and the creature, he finds a beautiful woman unconscious on the ground. He brings her back to the citadel, where he interrogates her, and soon gives in to his desires. She says her name is Argen. But there is a spy in The Fifty who wants them all dead, and Hawthe isn’t sure what Argen wants at Anwen Citadel—or with him.

For over 2,000 years, the area of India that is today western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh has served as the destination for devout Buddhist pilgrims from all over Asia. In 2010, James Kempf and his wife Renate undertook a pilgrimage to the Buddhist sacred sites together with 28 other Western pilgrims. Led by the renowned British meditation teacher Stephen Batchelor, the group visited the area where the Buddha walked and taught, an area untouched by the Indian high tech revolution yet rich in cultural treasures. In this frank memoir, Kempf tells the story of that pilgrimage, interwoven with the story of his 40 years of meditation training and his career as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. Follow Kempf as he ordains as a Zen priest and negotiates his way through the maze of the Silicon Valley reality distortion field, trying to find wisdom and compassion in the midst of greed, hatred, and confusion, and experiences the benefits and dangers of a hard core meditation practice. The path of pilgrimage and the path of practice unite in a realization that the Buddha’s teaching wasn’t about mysticism and meditation experiences, but rather about a rational, realistic blueprint for reducing suffering.

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Dada has spent the last 40 years of his life living among us just as a normal human being. He never asked for any special treatment or recognition. He always gave his spiritual teachings freely and has served his community in every possible capacity while still facing the same marital, familial, financial challenges that we all face. Dada’s life is an inspiration to us all. He has shown the way to all Americans that we can face each daily challenge, struggle and hardship and still keep our inner strength, our poise and our purpose through it all. Dada’s story will amaze you, will amuse you and will astound you and finally it will inspire in you the confidence that you can accomplish all that Dada has accomplished in your life as well.