The Skrayling Tree

“We here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,” Chesterton once wrote. “The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. ” So, too, in The Skrayling Tree, a novel about thought, action, and utterance; and the power of these alone to make or unmake many lives, many worlds. In this sequel to The Dreamthief's Daughter, Michael Moorcock returns readers to the manifold planes of the Multiverse where agents of Law battle forces of Chaos, and existence itself hangs in the balance. Into this struggle come three heroes, three aspects of the Eternal Champion, the warrior fated to reincarnate across time and space whenever, wherever the cosmic balance is threatened. In 1951 AD, Oona von Bek, the dreamthief's daughter, follows the trail of her kidnapped husband, Ulric, from Nova Scotia to a 12th-century America that never was, one in which pygmy tribes hunt cryptids, wooly mammoths stride the earth, and Hiawatha —Longfellow's mythical Ojibwe warrior— travels the untrammeled forests of present-day Michigan on a dream-quest of his own. Meanwhile, Elric — the albino antihero, emperor of doomed Melniboné — has fallen into the clutches of Jagreen Lern, an agent of Chaos. Lern has crucified Elric on the yardarm of his flagship, but Elric's mind is yet his own. He sleeps in order to slip his earthly bonds, sending his dream-self on a thousand-year journey to recover Stormbringer, the soul-drinking demon blade. His quest finds him reluctantly allied to Gunnar the Doomed, a Viking who searches the known world for fabled Vinland, itself the gateway to a primeval land of ice and cold: Nifelheim. But Gunnar is not the man he seems, as Ulric von Bek discovers to his horror while searching for his wife and a way back to his own time. Ulric's path ends in revelation, but begins with Lord Sepiriz, the Knight in Black and Yellow, a servant of the Cosmic Balance and the author of Ulric's kidnapping. Sepiriz tasks Ulric with an errand on which all of consciousness depends: healing the poisoned roots of the Skrayling Tree, the nexus of reality from which the Multiverse spreads. Three heroes. Three lives. Three paths converging at the crossroads where the Skrayling Tree grows. Beneath the branes of its canopy, Oona, Elric, and Ulric will join forces in an epic contest for the fate of the world. To fail is to plunge the universe and its every atom into inchoate chaos, a starless black midnight without purchase or cease.