The fourth installment in Melissa McPhail's award-winning epic fantasy series A Pattern of Shadow & Light

“When hope almost has no existence, a stronger blood will rise from near annihilation.” Forged to free mankind from the tyrannical grips of the Black Demon, the Blades of Heaven – made from ethereal metal and imbued with Heavenlies powers – inadvertently divides mankind because of man’s thirst for its powers. Laying low and in hiding, the Heavenlies spirits of the swords wait for man’s saviour they believe would come. Then a child is born … and the Heavenlies dragon has a vision. Sixteen years later, the child, the Heavenlies spirits and the Perennials embark on a journey in search for answers … one that is ominous, where sinister schemes and peril awaits them…

For more than a century flint daggers have been among the most closely studied and most heavily published later prehistoric lithic tools. It is well established that they are found across Europe and beyond, and that many were widely circulated over many generations. Yet, few researchers have attempted to discuss the entirety of the flint dagger phenomenon. The present volume brings together papers that address questions of the regional variability and socio-technical complexity of flint daggers and their production. It focuses on the typology, chronology, technology, functionality and meaning of flint and other lithic daggers produced primarily in Europe, but also in the Eastern Mediterranean and East Asia, in prehistory. The 14 papers by leading researchers provide a comprehensive overview of the state of knowledge concerning various flint dagger corpora as well as potential avenues for the development of a research agenda across national, regional and disciplinary boundaries. The volume originates from a session held at the 2011 meeting of the European Association of Archaeology but includes additional commissioned contributions.

The Chemical Weapons Convention requires, among other things, that the signatories to the conventionâ€"which includes the United Statesâ€"destroy by April 29, 2007, or as soon possible thereafter, any chemical warfare materiel that has been recovered from sites where it has been buried once discovered. For several years the United States and several other countries have been developing and using technologies to dispose of this non-stockpile materiel. To determine whether international efforts have resulted in technologies that would benefit the U.S. program, the U.S. Army asked the NRC to evaluate and compare such technologies to those now used by the United States. This book presents a discussion of factors used in the evaluations, summaries of evaluations of several promising international technologies for processing munitions and for agent-only processing, and summaries of other technologies that are less likely to be of benefit to the U.S. program at this time.