Search Worlds Without End

While growing up under Bartlemy's protective eye, Nathan Ward senses something else watching him, a shift of shadows in the surrounding Darkwood. Then pieces of his dreams begin to come to life. A man he saved from the ocean washes ashore on the television news. A greenish stone cup set with jewels that has haunted his visions sounds eerily like one lost by the Thorn family centuries ago-a cup that has recently made its way back into the hands of the village's last living ancestor.

Yet when Nathan learns the chalice may have come from another world, a land with bloodstained moons and a toxic sun, he knows he is destined to play a part in something beyond his most vivid imagination. But why is the cup here, and what could it possibly want with a teenage boy and a sleepy town of villagers full of tall tales? With the help of his best friend, Hazel, Nathan must figure out why he's been chosen-and for what purpose. Even if it means traveling deeper each night into dreams, into lands, into legends that both terrify and mesmerize him.

Parallel universes and grave danger are nothing new to Nathan Ward. During his last mission, he risked life and limb to retrieve the Grail for safekeeping. But Nathan's adventures are just beginning. Lately his dreams have been transporting him to a desolate city whose people have fled-save for a sickly king and his daughter, Princess Nell. In their decaying hilltop castle, they live in the shadow of a terrifying curse inflicted by a sword that holds within its gleaming metal an ancient demon conjured by the universe's most powerful wizard. It is a sword that brings death to anyone who dares to draw it from its sheath.

But the king is dying, and the legend claims that only a stranger can save him... and that this stranger alone is destined to awake-and defeat-the dark evil in the sword. But who among mortals and spirits could ever imagine that a boy materializing into alternate worlds still dressed in his pajamas could be the chosen one... the one entrusted with the long-lost plan to retrieve the Grail relics and save a dying cosmos?

Nathan Ward's unique ability to enter his dreams and parallel worlds has followed him into adolescence. With Nathan's growing maturity comes a deeper understanding of his mission; he must stop an insidious and pervasive evil. Queen Nefufar's dark power is growing. In the strange world Nathan visits, land is a distant memory, save for the rumored islands and melting ice caps. The queen's dream of extinguishing the lungbreathers, including man, and ruling over a watery kingdom of cold-blooded creatures is in reach.

Meanwhile, in another dimension, on Earth, there are rumblings of doom. Nathan senses a shift in the atmosphere, and the wizard of the Cosmos broods over the imbalance. There is one chance for salvation: Nathan must capture the third Grail relic, a poisoned iron crown that Nefufar keeps locked beneath the ocean in a chamber of air. But how can a mere boy make his way millions of miles down into the boiling, watery depths and capture the crown from a ferocious seadragon?