There comes a time in the life of every intelligent species when they must take time to ponder their place in the worlds beyond. For the vastness outside the confines of their planet teems with life, ever-awaiting for their fated introduction. Sometimes, however, fate has strange ways of accelerating the inevitable. This is a story for those who wonder what awaits them as they look to the stars. And who see how quickly the normal can turn into something more, with but a breath from the beyond. This is a story for those who believe the future may not be so far away. For they with imagination unbound, wanting to catch a glimpse of what the beyond might look like. For they that wish that maybe, just maybe, they will become part of something more. This is a story for humanity, as it looks up to the sky and asks, “Where am I, in all of this?”

With Zane finally becoming the King of the light Fae lands, many things surrounding the Kingdom start coming to light. After finally becoming closer with his father, Azrael keeps warning Zane of impending danger, from the visions he keeps seeing. Zane starts opening his heart up for the first time in four centuries, to the person he expects the least to be part of his own. Follow Zane and the Light Faerie kingdom, for the next installment in the light Faerie series

On January 6, 2021, an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. This assault on America’s democratic system was orchestrated by then President Donald Trump, abetted by his political party, and supported by a vocal minority of the American people. Did denial of the election results and the subsequent insurrection inflict damage on American political institutions? While most pundits and many scholars say yes, they have offered little rigorous evidence for this assertion. In Democracy’s Destruction? political scientist James L. Gibson uses surveys from representative samples of the American population to provide a more informed answer to the question. Focusing on the U.S. Supreme Court, the presidency, and the U.S. Senate, Gibson reveals that how people assessed the election, the insurrection, and even the second Trump impeachment has little connection to their willingness to view American political institutions as legitimate. Instead, legitimacy is grounded in more general commitments to democratic values and support for the rule of law. On most issues of institutional legitimacy, those who denied the election results and supported the insurrection were not more likely to be alienated from political institutions and to consider them illegitimate. Gibson also investigates whether Black people might have responded differently to the events of the 2020 election and its aftermath. He finds that in comparison to the White majority, Black Americans were less supportive of America’s democratic institutions and of democratic values, such as reverence for the rule of law, because they often have directly experienced unfair treatment by legal authorities. But he emphasizes that the actions of Trump and his followers are not the cause of those weaker commitments. Democracy’s Destruction? offers rigorous analysis of the effect of the Trump insurrection on the state of U.S. democracy today. While cautioning that Trump and many Republicans may be devising schemes to subvert the next presidential election more effectively, the book attests to the remarkable endurance of American political institutions.

Augustus and the Destruction of History explores the intense controversies over the meaning and profile of the past that accompanied the violent transformation of the Roman Republic into the Augustan principate. The ten case studies collected here analyse how different authors and agents (individual and collective) developed specific conceptions of history and articulated them in a wide variety of textual and visual media to position themselves within the emergent (and evolving) new Augustan normal. The chapters consider both hegemonic and subaltern endeavours to reconfigure Roman memoria and pay special attention to power and polemics, chaos, crisis and contingency – not least to challenge some long-standing habits of thought about Augustus and his principate and its representation in historiographical discourse, ancient and modern. Some of the most iconic texts and monuments from ancient Rome receive fresh discussion here, including the Forum Romanum and the Forum of Augustus, Virgil’s Aeneid and the Fasti Capitolini.

Examines predatory practices in mortgage markets to provide invaluable insight into the racial wealth gap between black and white Americans.

Once again, for the first time, Marx and Durkheim join forces while exploring the moral economy of neoliberalism. Resignation and Ecstasy provides a fresh perspective on the immortal vortex of sacred energies pulsating beneath the peculiar logic of modern accumulation. Relying on dialectical methods, classical sociology and psychoanalysis are reconstituted within an Hegelian social ontology to differentiate the ephemeral from the eternal aspects of social life.

'It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered' - US President Harry S. Truman Truman evidently understood the terrifying power of atomic weaponry, but no one could have realised its full potential when he ordered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Those military attacks, along with the disasters at the Fukashima and Chernobyl nuclear reactors, might immediately spring to mind at the mention of nuclear destruction, but the vast majority of the events recorded in this book are entirely unknown to most people. This book records the facts - many of them still shrouded in secrecy - which show a worrying truth: we have teetered precariously on the brink of Armageddon far more frequently than the general public realises. Since that first and last atomic war in 1945, there have been a terrifying number of nuclear accidents and mishaps, from the careless or accidental to the genuinely intentional and only narrowly averted. Despite the catastrophic nature of any nuclear conflict, we have come to the very borders of such a situation ten times since the 1960s. Most people know about the Cuba Missile Crisis, and a few about Operation Able Archer in 1984, which, if anything, was even more frightening than Cuba, but there have been eight other occasions that might easily have toppled over into outright war. These were potential conflicts; but there have been other accidents, such as the reactor meltdown at the nuclear generating plant at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979, or the 'Palomares Incident' in 1966, when a USAF B-52 bomber crashed after a mid-air collision, dropping four hydrogen bombs on Spanish soil . . . Eve of Destruction is a warning from history - recent history. It is a call to sit up and listen, and to take note of the very real danger of nuclear catastrophe. It is a timely and important book because, after all, the future of our planet has to concern us all.

Murder is committed for its own sake in the three fictional episodes of The Book of Destruction. In ‘The Gardener’, the narrator learns from the thug Seshadri that he has been selected for assassination for no reason but the pure purpose of killing. A discotheque is bombed out of existence in ‘The Hotelier and the Traveller’. In the third episode, leading the narrator to an elaborately staged orgy and sacrifice, stitched clothes escape from a tailor’s shop and soar down the streets to take over bodies. The cruelty of killers and the wretchedness of victims are shifted to the margins as the novel focuses on the act of murder. In his inimitable style, Anand takes the mesmerized reader on a journey of three stages—the practice of killing, the sacrifice of the victim and the sacrifice of the sacrificer—before bringing the story of destruction to its finale.

Allyssa was raised as royalty. Savenek had been trained as a spy. Allyssa grew up doted on by her parents. Savenek's adoptive father had often shown his love through strict training and discipline. Allyssa died too soon, loved and mourned by her kingdom. Savenek is supposed to take her place, but struggles to win the hearts of the people and parents who don't know him. When Savenek finally settles in to life at court, Allyssa shows up alive, in time for their seventeenth birthday celebration. Everything in Savenek's life feels like it’s exploding again. While Allyssa has managed to stop the war with Russek and form a powerful alliance, Savenek knows there is a greater danger surrounding them. As Emperion teeters on the brink of war, a much more personal battle plays out between twin siblings. If Allyssa and Savenek want to save their kingdom from being destroyed, they must learn to work together, trust one another, and rely on each other. When duty, loyalty, and family clash, can there be room for two royal heirs? Especially when one is being a royal pain?

Dare to read the story of the end where "Left Behind" left off. Before this world is made into a virtual utopia it's destined to be destroyed by fire; But Christians won't have to go through those fiery days that shall burn as an oven, as recorded in Malachi 4; And our Heavens won't even allow their tears to be shed, as thirsty grounds below swiftly spread everywhere, while turning our planet into a giant dust bowl. Then our earth's crust will resonate from the resounding of moving mantle, that shall quickly waste all of the cities of a doomed race that foolishly followed after the ways of Babylon. And the electrical explosions of lightening crackles will then suddenly detonate within our expanse like unstable chemicals, that reacts ferociously with non compatible elements. Even our continental shelves shall also be rearranged in our new earth, when the underlying strata is moved miles out of it's place by gargantuan earthquakes. Then our abandoned coastlines will be rapidly betrayed by waters, that leave real quick without any word. And within all areas of the circle of our earth new dry land shall suddenly arise to contend with bloody looking muck that shall be thrown up during volcanic conniptions. For our former forgotten seas will be swiftly transformed from eruptions, while they abruptly become parched badlands of the driest thirsty kind. And those bone dry lands will suddenly be floating upon steaming lava as it cools. Then the deepest gorges will be unexpectedly filled in by our ever shaking earth. At that point, our entire firmament will also be enshrouded with some real dusty ashes, while speedily producing real stagnant blackened clouds, that will be unable to empty themselves, due to the supernatural restraints that God shall place upon them. Furthermore, all unprotected life will then hastily cease, during those most foreboding, and darkest hours of God's very worst fury; For all of the past vegetation of our greenest plains will then abruptly curl up into little balls, while quickly perishing very quick beneath the scorching rays of our sun that has gone more than crazy. And our planet will then immediately be stripped naked due to all of those combined happenings, that will rapidly lead to untold destruction. But after all those above horrid things have finally come to pass, only at that point shall our earth soon arise and shine, with our God's most loving restoration. And the mortal remnant of our great tribulation era shall then always live together with immortal resurrected people, that shall no longer be male or female. And all of our Lord's elect shall then live evermore upon a blessed remade world, that will never pass away.