The Side Ways, Book 1: Awake. Chapter 1, ”Illusion,” Part 1

Welcome to The Side Ways!

This is the first part of the first chapter of the first book in the urban fantasy series, The Side Ways," by Andy Havens. You can learn more about the series, download the first book for free, get the links to buy it as a paperback or ebook on Amazon, read the development blog and create fan fiction at www.the-side-ways.com. A quick synopsis for new readers/listeners:

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The Side Ways is a 3-book urban fantasy series that centers around Kendra White, a girl whose parents belonged to a world that exists alongside our own. A world of seven separate Domains, peopled by “Reckoners,” some thousands of years old, who gain Ways of power from specific, dedicated perspectives.

Raised as an outsider – a “Mundane” – Kendra tries to make sense of a realm where every observation, decision and ability depends on one’s viewpoints and perceptions. What is fundamental to a Reckoner of Sight may be unimportant or even dangerous to those from Earth, Blood, Release, Increase, Flux and Chaos. And though awakened to the Domains, Kendra is still outside them; she does not belong to any of the related Seven Houses.

In her struggle to understand their history and tensions, she becomes an inadvertent piece in a power game some six-thousand years in the playing. A game whose last round ended with the Great Flood that nearly wiped the world clean of both Reckoners and Mundanes.

In the first book, "Awake," Kendra enters the world of the Domains but struggles to understand the people and creatures she meets there. She is a very rare creature in two ways; she is the daughter of two Houses – Release and Increase – and was raised outside the knowledge of the Domains. She is unaffiliated, and this is not only confusing for her, but dangerous.

Most Reckoners grow up within a Domain where life, the world and access to powerful, supernatural Ways depend on your House’s perspective. In addition, the Law that guides interaction between the Houses does not apply to outsiders. Two strange events in one day – an odd and frightening Rorschach test and a dangerous encounter in the topiary garden she helps care for – bring her to partial awareness of the Domains. But she is still an outsider and does not yet completely accept that these events aren’t just elements of her imagination.

Brought to Solomon Monday, the Librarian and Master of Sight, she is given a deadly test that will either fully awaken her Reckoning, or be her death.

In the second book, “Aware,” Kendra learns more about her powers and begins to glimpse the ancient tensions between the Houses. She is brought into the confidence of powerful Reckoners who begin to put the pieces together of a sinister, conspiracy on behalf of two of the Houses to overthrow the long peace of the Law and return the world to a time of bloodshed and global, magical war.

But while they make plans and solidify assumptions, Kendra discovers that even this treachery may hide a deeper, more fundamental danger to the Domains.

The series concludes in Book Three, "Again."

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If you enjoy the books in any format, please share a link to www.the-side-ways.com via your favorite social channel. Thanks!

- Andy