Tales of Bastunia: "Joan's Calling" (Book 1)

"Joan's Calling"

The Year is 293.

In Main City, enter Joan, a clever but scorned No-Beast. Life is hard for No-Beasts, but worse for Joan, whose father is Bastunia’s greatest beastborn hero. The world has driven a wedge between them, leaving her to fend for herself in this falling world. The scholarly girl’s aggression is mounting. Her anger is threatening to consume her.

Just when it seems things cannot get any harder for Joan, she gets into a back-alley fight defending a friendless schoolmate. In the wake of the fight, her life is forever changed.

About the Tales of Bastunia series:

For all of history, the god of Bastunia has bestowed upon the people a gift: a spiritual beast-companion that helps them on their life’s Path. In the span of a couple hundred years, they have turned from barbarians into high society. But when the god vanishes, leaving people to find their own way, their civilized world begins to fall apart.

First there was Discovery, a period of history that emerged out of an unknown past. Time began here with the first scrawlings of the Record. Next, a gifted god with his ingenuities and the help of a few chosen Bastunians, created Order. It was a time of enlightenment, achievement, and great expansion. The people were certain that Order was an epoch that would never end. But, the darkness of the cosmos hid chaos-spawn whose lives were devoted to destruction. Order lasted barely one hundred years. At the eve of the second century, the god’s creation began to show cracks. It was an era marked by apparent neglect, by abandonment, by turmoil, and it was aptly named the Crumble. Now the god has been completely missing for sixteen years, and Bastunia is well into the modern era: the Fall. 

A young girl, a mousey friend, and a disgraced hero find themselves unlikely allies in the quest to find the missing God, and restore Order.