Souls of Ergos Book One: Of Staves and Sigmas James Wagner of earth. Voknor of Ergos. One man. Two names. Two worlds. Or are they? Even James Wagner himself cannot be sure. When a lifetime of increasingly tumultuous psychotic breaking is suddenly exacerbated by a new and inconceivable phenomenon of incorporeal shifting, he is literally forced to question the very ground upon which he strides. The wild, mediaevalesque visions that haunt and beckon him, the time and memory that are stripped away in ever-increasing blocks, the violent persona that out of nowhere commandeers his body and runs rampant and sometimes apparitionally in his absence-is Wagner losing his soul, or is he gaining another one, a darker one? Of Stave and Sigmas is a multi-levelled tale of dualism and destiny, a story of a conflicted man's descent into-and out of-a madness that spirits him to the impossibly familiar world of his mind's eye, a world that may in actuality be far more real than the phantasmal construct that he's always believed it to be. GEOFFREY VERDEGAST lived in Germany as a boy. Born to an American father and a German mother, his formative years were a complementary infusion of both cultures. Benefiting from many a family excursion along the richly historic Rhine and Mosel rivers, the innumerable treks across Deutschland's verdant countryside, and the illuminating explorations of the castles and the quaint villages of renaissance and mediaeval antiquity-the nuances of Europe's bygone days imprinted themselves indelibly upon his young mind. Drawing from this wealth of experience, Verdegast has crafted OF STAVES AND SIGMAS, a spirited tale of wit and wonder-and the first instalment in his SOULS OF ERGOSphantasy-adventure series. Thrusting his unwitting, contemporary protagonist into a violent, archaic, other-worldly culture, the author pits modern pragmatism against Old World mysticism, tests the epic concepts of trust, love, valour and tolerance, and re-examines the morals and mores that shape and influence all sentient beings.