Fire Thief
During the autumn of that year, several months before my twenty-third birthday, we began recording our album for upstart label Critical Mass: The album that the world would never let us forget.
This bit of serendipity had followed a period of dissipated hopes and, at its darkest verges, the deep lacerations of despair. Following a triumphant gig at Broomstick Belladonna’s in New York – a sort of informal Battle of the Bands that had been an intended celebration of peak summer – our band, Edge of the Known, had been courted by two record labels, Widowed Soul Records and Phantom Hordes.
Neither of these leads proved to be avenues towards our most cherished future, however, as these companies failed to grasp that we were an utterly self-made band with absolutely no intentions of putting on airs in order to ‘make it’ in the industry.
We followed the Muse, because that was the only thing we knew how to do. And it was the only thing worth doing, even if it could potentially cost us all possible remuneration for our efforts.
By this time we’d all started wearing apparel that my girlfriend Janie had made for us, much of it from buckskin that she’d obtained from a local butcher’s during the deer hunting season. We were looking more and more “native” by the week.
But one thing Phantom Horde’s Gurdon Hill ‘suggested’, one night over dinner at McNeil’s Fish ‘n’ Chips, was that we abandon all this and adopt a more “conventionally metal” look, replete with black leather pants, studded belts; basically, he was advocating an image that Tommy and I, particularly, had already perfected throughout our High School tenure.
And I wasn’t exactly averse to it even now; but the idea of anyone dictating my sartorial sense was infuriating.
Humanity’s Way Forward (The Edge of the Known, Book 3) Description:
“The echoes of those scars can clearly be heard in Edge of the Known’s music. But one can also discern, quite distinctly, that other inexplicable thing that is within us all, the undying flame that transcends our wounds and sufferings…”
Brandon Chane had always seen life through the eyes of an outcast, a misfit, a young man at odds with the world and with himself. Now they’re calling him a wounded healer; a shamanic Pied Piper for the throngs of alienated youth; a thief of fire.
He wonders if he and his band can escape the claims that the world has suddenly laid upon them. But what about the cherished dream that he’s struggled so desperately to fulfill, the dream that finally seems to be coming to fruition?
