Tales of Balia
Fantasy with a Christian Worldview
Enter Balia, a world not so different from our own. Explore lush landscapes and rich cultures as Balia’s creator, TrueGod, moves through many times and places to find lost and broken people to call his own. Fantasy with a Christian worldview. Read in any order. Click titles for more information on each book.
Trek the most dangerous path in Balia...
Meandering around a volcanic ridge, through jungle lowlands, and over salt flats, Dusk Lane is a route only the most desperate travelers find, and without strong guides nobody can survive the path through the beautiful and dangerous interior of Chimelu. Rika is one such guide, but this group of travelers might prove to be more than he can handle, for each has suffered great loss.
Young Aaden has lost his music; beautiful Suri has lost her voice; bold Annora has lost her future, and all three hope something on the path can restore them. Rika finds he has lost his detachment, and as he sinks more deeply into the lives of his travelers, he realizes this trek down the Lane may change his entire life. Of course, they’re traveling in the rainy season when the path is most dangerous, so there’s a good chance they won’t survive to change at all.
Enter Balia, a world not so different from our own. Explore lush landscapes and rich cultures as Balia’s creator, TrueGod, moves through many times and places to find lost and broken people to call his own. Fantasy with a Christian worldview.
Her impatience might mean his end
Gypsy siblings Iara, seventeen, and Xabi, four, are kidnapped by slavers and taken to a land far from their own, where they escape into a town that hates foreigners. The only help they find is Nen, a young, foreign thief who helps them at great personal expense and then attempts to get them home.
But Iara’s impatience endangers them, especially the young thief who worked so hard to help them. It will take great sacrifice on Iara’s part to right her wrong and save her friend, after which she hopes to drag him on a long, dangerous journey home.
Too bad home doesn’t turn out to be what any of them expected and longed for.
Can broken souls save a dying city?
In the ancient desert town of Alagor, nobody is more lost and broken than Banar, the lame beggar, unless it’s Anna, the royal slave, or Alandro, the wounded baker, or even Malia, the lonely noble daughter. When TrueGod weaves their lives together, leading them to unexpected friendships and even love, he creates alliances that could also save the city from the devastating secret plans of a power-seeking magistrate. The stakes are high, for unless these damaged souls can step out of their ordinary roles and do things they would never dare alone, lives all across Alagor could be lost, including their own.
Enter Balia, a world not so different from our own. Explore lush landscapes and rich cultures as Balia’s creator, TrueGod, moves through many times and places to find lost and broken people to call his own. Fantasy with a Christian worldview.
The new stable boys are causing quite a stir
When two new stable boys show up at Hawthorn Castle, everyone knows they aren’t who they say, but laundry mistress Valerie has no idea their secrets will change her entire life. The deity TrueGod, though, has planned this crossing of paths for many years, and before all is revealed, Valerie and her friend Harmony will lose everything they always knew, travel dangerous paths, and try to find life in a new world filled with danger.
For Faraday and Alex, the plan is simply to protect Valerie and the secrets she doesn’t know about herself. Instead, they tip their hands and end up dragging the girls into danger to escape an old enemy. But even they don’t know the depths of the secrets surrounding them, and TrueGod will use these secrets to change not only the lives of stable boys and house maids but the fates of entire kingdoms.
Where will his loyalties lie?
Taken from his home in his youth, Nikolai is now a guard protecting the royal mistresses in the Most Glorious Land of Long. When invaders from his homeland kidnap the girls—and everyone else in the summer palace—he begins a journey to get help for those missing and find the truth behind the invasion.
He manages to rescue two of his charges, and with the help of a woman from his past who despises him, a guard from the main palace, and a boy who dreams of adventure, he works to restore the girls to safety, but secrets from his past, as well as secrets within the House of Long itself, threaten the entire Glorious Land. Can one tired, broken guard, even with TrueGod at his side, restore the kidnapped souls? And where does his allegiance truly lie? Nikolai must answer these questions and more as he takes a trip into a painful past and faces people and places he thought gone from his life forever.
Deadly secrets hid on the island
Shipwrecked on an island in the empty restricted zone, Laurelin is rescued by an unusual and deformed man named Yaron who speaks to the birds and seems to live alone. Although she has traveled across Balia to speak of TrueGod, she has no idea how to touch this man, who cannot communicate in any way. Soon she realizes an entire village thrives on the island, and Yaron fears this village for reasons Laurelin can’t understand.
Yaron has dreamed of leaving the island and finding a home where he could belong, where he needn’t live in fear and silence, and he wonders if Laurelin has brought him escape. However, he can’t communicate with her, and he fears even in her world his deformed body and bizarre mind will never find peace and community.
Together, they discover true communication as well as love and acceptance. But they also discover the secrets behind this island world, ancient secrets that the leaders will kill to hide. Not only does the pair face danger from the village, but danger comes from the lands beyond the island, as well, and Laurelin and Yaron may be the only ones with the ability to save the village.
Their world had shaken apart
Ages ago, a fortress in Wystan valley was abandoned. Its secrets were forgotten. It lay in silence, waiting.
Many years later, an earthquake shook the valley. The small village of Porfirio lost many of her people, and her leader Birch had no choice but to flee to a neighboring village led by Aurora, a woman he’d once loved, a woman whose religion and life were so different from his they could barely sit in a room together.
The earthquake opened the valley to an enemy that wanted to restore to the valley a religion of death and a system of hatred. The key to their power lay in a weapon hidden in an old, abandoned fortress.
Aurora and Birch flee with their people to the fortress for safety, no idea the enemy wishes to seize it. They soon realize their only hope, and the hope for the entire valley, lies in deciphering the secrets and clues in the fortress and discovering its treasures before the enemy arrives. It means they must work together, whatever the cost.
Success will save the valley. It might even save Birch and Aurora. Failure will mean plunging the valley into eons of blood and death.
Unity is their strength
One fateful day changes everything for Christianna Habersham, daughter of a wealthy jewelry guilder. After an attack leaves her unconscious and injured at the side of the road, an exiled gypsy man finds and cares for her, then leaves her in her provincial Boreal town on his quest to find his place in the world.
TrueGod, though, sees fit to put the pair together, and they are wed with no real knowledge of one another or the worlds in which each was raised. Christi fights to tame the wandering gypsy, and Marcus fights to learn about the heart of a woman, and it becomes all too easy to drift apart for the sake of peace. Eventually they must learn to put each other and their love for TrueGod above all else, or they will lose something they love and themselves in the process.
Only she saw his potential...
For generations two peoples have fought over the mountains of Thanador. The native Tarra’ans hate the recent arrivals, the Contolte, and eventually that hatred turns to war. Yaotl and Jensen, though, are a Tarra’an and a Contolte who live as brothers. Yearning to stay together, they find no safe place where both can be welcomed.
Born across the great water, Nadia is a missioner from the clinic who is able to walk outside the battle. When her path crosses that of the two men, one of them injured, they decide to escape down the burning, warring mountain together. She leads them to a Tarra’an village that claims to love TrueGod and promises to protect both the men, but some hatred takes time to fade, and even here they can’t escape the danger that swallows the mountain.
But they also find allies and friends, even a little romance, and when ancient evil threatens to destroy the whole mountain, love and friendship may be the only things to save any of them, Tarra’an and Contolte alike.
His whole life was haunted...
He was never meant to live this life
As he turns nineteen, Nick Kyngeston seems to have the world. He’s the heir to one of the most important kingdoms on Caperton Island. He’s engaged to the girl he’s loved all his life. He has wealth and looks and prestige. Unfortunately, all of it is supposed to belong to his twin brother, who drowned years ago, leaving Nick with a life he doesn’t want and memories that haunt him.
Anselm, a foreign stable boy, appears just as Nick is thrust into his new role as the adult heir, a commoner who knows nothing of noble life and propriety and makes Nick laugh. Then Anselm saves Nick’s life, nearly at the expense of his own, and they realize someone is trying to kill the heir to the throne, which puts Nick, his fiancée Cecily, and everyone else on the Kyngeston estate in danger.
While trying to thwart the danger, Nick and Anselm seek answers in a locked garden filled with mysteries and secrets from the past. But the tangle of secrets will lead them to discoveries that will change the lives of everyone on Caperton Island and could throw the future of the island into chaos.
Could they rescue the boy who saved them all?
In the city of Balivor, orphans work in the dangerous new factories and face danger and death daily. One young orphan known only as The Wryneck sacrifices everything to rescue them. Then he disappears, and hope among the orphans disappears with him.
Two friends, orphans themselves who had escaped Balivor, return as adults to change the laws and protect these children. Galen and Zoe hear stories of the selfless wryneck and use his stories to try to change the hearts of the city. Then they stumble upon the fate of the wryneck, and they begin an epic journey to rescue the young man who had saved them all.
Venturing deep into the myths of the nearby sea as well as the depths of the wryneck’s broken spirit, the two friends follow TrueGod’s leading into strange and dangerous places to stage a rescue and determine a way to save an entire city of orphans.
Marriage is scary. So are sea monsters.
For Vion Yorraan, marriage had gotten old, but as the son of a woman who married six times, he never expected much from the institution in the first place. As for Dianna, who lost her mama young and had a papa who never got over the loss, her attempts to keep the peace in their tired marriage weren’t helping.
When Dianna takes a little time away from her husband, neither of them realizes they have set into motion a journey that will keep them apart for months while TrueGod chases them to some of the most unusual locations in all of Balia.
For TrueGod wishes for their hearts, and to do that he shows them the strength and beauty of marriage using mythical cat creatures, people from their pasts, and even a sea monster as he leads them across the Salted Sea. If they learn the lessons he teaches and embrace him as the author of their lives and their love, perhaps one day they will finally get home.
One little orphan changed their world...
When an ancient gypsy elder finds tiny Pasco alone in the mountains, orphaned and hiding near his dead mother, she offers him a new home with her people. Her only warning—to keep his secret to himself. For clues suggest his mama was a Sekou, a near-mythical cat shifter, and Pasco one day might become one himself. If anyone discovers him, Pasco and the entire clan might be in danger.
He turns out to be his mother’s son, changing in his teens and keeping the secret from all but his best friend Kew, who helps with his dual nature. But three times that year he has to expose himself to save lives of loved ones. The third time is Kew himself, and Pasco will do anything to save his friend. Once his secret is out, there’s no turning back for anyone in the clan.
Soon every cult on the continent comes for Pasco, either to kill him or to use his parts for curses and potions. His only hope is a whispered, hidden village of Sekou somewhere to the east, so the clan begins a desperate trip through the winter to find Pasco a safe home. Unfortunately, the god they honor slows them, sending other lost Sekou and gypsies to them, all followed by danger and enemies of their own. A simple rescue for a single Sekou becomes a quest to house a whole village of lost people.
But what scares Pasco the most? Not locating the village or even surviving the journey. No, he fears losing his gypsy family along the way, for everyone knows gypsies don’t survive on their own. Scroll up and grab your copy now. The Tales of Balia series, fantasy with a Christian worldview.
Two books in one volume
Get two Balia books in one volume. Most Glorious Land and Desert Rains are together for the first time and available in paperback or hard cover editions.