The third novel in The Conrad Chronicles series finds Gloria of the House of Vasilis married to Ambassador Arsilin Lucas and living on Earth. While she bears and raises three children with the assistance of her loyal friend Hobbs, her brother, Zeplan, is aboard the Galactic Falcon, endeavoring to foil Xavier of the House of Baldemar's plans to eradicate all the humans living on the planet Karna. Unfortunately Gloria and Zeplan don't know that Xavier has located Gloria and arrived on Earth to challenge her to Death Duel in order to absorb her Light-given abilities. What Xavier doesn't know is that The Chosen One, Gloria's youngest child, Lucy, has been born, and that this seven year old girl will change all his plans.

Lucy Gloria Vasilis Lucas struggles to accept her new life. She no longer is seen as the daughter of Ambassador Arsilin Lucas, the child who witnessed her mother's murder, but is now valued as the daughter of Gloria of the House of Vasilis, a Conrad of the Light, and the Chosen One who is destined to defeat Xavier of the House of Baldemar. At the age of eighteen, Lucy has gone from living at Willow Manor on Earth to living aboard the space ship, the Galactic Falcon. Her life has gone from one of surviving the brutality of the adults around her to being presented with a universe full of options. The magnitude of these sudden changes has sent Lucy's mind into shock. As Lucy adjusts to space living, and slowly accepts she is alive and not delusional, she finds herself trying to accept the concept of being a Conrad, a human able to control energy. In addition, she must get to know her Uncle Zeplan, an uncle she never knew existed until the day he rescued her off of Earth.

Book 2 in the Conrad Chronicles begins with Xavier locked in a thousand cycle Death Duel with Gloria's twin sister Thera. Gloria, Regal, and the other Conrads of the Light struggle to heal the damage Xavier, his Outcasts, and his Carmine army have caused to the planet Karna and her inhabitants. As the Conrads of the Light work at advancing Karna's decimated technology, they come to learn that during Karna's former years, under the reigning High Kings, ships of people left to colonize other planets and head out to learn more while waiting for the Death Duel to end.

For 250 planet cycles the elders concealed their secret: they had been exiled from Karna for using their Conrad abilities. Upon settling the planet Aleron they raised their children and continued to evolve as handlers of energy forces. The Conrads of the Light believed their thriving, peaceful world would endure. When ""the children"" learn of the exile, the Conrad utopian world on Aleron disintegrates. Desiring to become the next Conrad leader, Xavier of the House of Baldemar craves vengeance. He convinces several of his peers to follow him on his quest to annihilate the humans of Karna. Meanwhile, Gloria of the House of Vasilis is assailed by guilt over the questions she asked that sparked Xavier's desire for revenge. Forced into a position of leadership, Gloria is sent by the elders to stop Xavier. Gloria doubts her own abilities, especially when her twin sister chooses to follow Xavier.

The Illuminated Chronicle was composed in 1358 in the international artistic style at the royal court of Louis I of Hungary. Its text, presented here in a new edition and translation, is the most complete record of Hungary's medieval historical tradition, going back to the eleventh century and including the mythical past of its people. The pictures in this manuscript—formerly known as the Vienna Chronicle—are not merely occasional illustrations added to some exemplars, but text and image are closely connected and mutually related to each other, to qualify it as a proper “illuminated chronicle”. The artistic value of the miniatures is quite high, and the characters are drawn with detail and with a knowledge of anatomy. Forty-two of the miniatures are included in the present volume. A full color facsimile will be accessible online. The 147 pictures are an invaluable source of information on late medieval cultural history, costume, and court life. In a historiographical context, The Illuminated Chronicle is an attempt at the popularization of the national history and a systematic appeal to circles beyond the old monastic-clerical audience. The Illuminated Chronicle (Chronica de gestis Hungarorum e codice picto saec. xiv.) is the ninth volume in the Central European Medieval Texts, a Latin–English bilingual series.

"Joseph Conrad is not only recognized as one of the world's great writers of English - and world - literature, but as a writer who lived a fascinating, unusually full and adventurous life. But Conrad's life presents the biographer with uncommon difficulty because, whether due to his itinerancy as a young man, the destruction of documentary evidence in the turmoil of the twentieth century, or the discreetness and relative isolation Conrad cultivated in his years as a writer, there are many periods for which documentation is difficult." "Zdzislaw Najder's meticulously documented biography first appeared in English in 1983, a product of twenty five years of painstaking study, and received great praise as the best, most complete biography of Conrad. Najder's command of English, French, Polish, and Russian allowed him access to a greater variety of sources than any other biographer, and this has again come into play in the present revised edition. It provides extensive new material, much of it unearthed to newly opened former east-bloc archives. Najder's Polish background and his own experience as an exile in the 1980s have afforded him an unmatched affinity for Conrad and his milieu." "There is new material on Conrad's father's genealogy and his role as a Polish national leader; Conrad's service in the French and British merchant marines; his early English reading and correspondence; his experiences in the Congo and their international context; the circumstances of writing A Personal Record and Under Western Eyes; and much more. In addition, several aspects of Conrad's life and works are more thoroughly and precisely analyzed: his problems with the English language; his borrowings from French writers; his attitude toward socialism; and his reaction to the reception of his books. New material makes up a quarter of the text of the revised edition and almost three-quarters of the references."--BOOK JACKET.