Eternity Should Not Be Lost to Us
The immortals are real, having existed in time for some 200,000 years or more, some of them deified as gods and goddesses in their long lives and their existence had been kept secret, and chronicled by the skolaks, the keepers of their history. One of the more notorious and most powerful of these immortals, Edelon, self-entombed for the last 500 years, is about to be resurrected by her lover Rutheven, finally reunited after all this time; although for Edelon their time apart was but months, for Rutheven his time without her was measured in centuries. Her return to this world also signalled the return of her enemy, the assassin Tervagant.
Darren Hopkins
Darren Hopkins is as an art historian, a sculptor (clay and metal), and photographic processing. Many years ago, he had a strange dream concerning the discovery of an ancient and immortal woman trapped deep within the earth, and of releasing her from this strange tomb, not knowing whether this creature to be released was dangerous or safe, good or evil, or something that could not be so defined. As a result of this dream, which stayed with him for a very long time, his literary interests drifted from art towards languages as a way of trying to understand the history of this fictional immortal and all that she had seen. This woman, over 3500 years old, eventually look on the name Edelon, a bastardization of the old Homeric Greek word eidolon‘an unreal image, a phantom, spectre, an image appearing in a dream’. To build up the historicity of this character and the other immortal and historical characters around her, he began to study and learn ancient languages, beginning with Latin, which he began in a roundabout way by translating the simple graffiti written on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Since that time, he has studied a good many other languages, such as Sumerian, Egyptian Hieroglyphic, Hurrian, Minoan (CretanHieroglyphic, Linear A), Hittite, Kassite, Luwian, Ugaritic, Mycenaean, Phoenician, Greek, Etruscan, Old Latin, Sabellic, Middle Persian, Old Celtic, Runic, Gothic(Visigothic, Ostrogothic, Vandal, Burgundian), Old Provencal, Old French, MiddleHigh German, etc. Some of these language studies have resulted in published articles over the years, on vulgar Latin, Old French, Middle High German and the untranslated Minoan languages of Cretan Hieroglyphic (20–17th C BC) and LinearA (17–14th C BC) (the language of the character Edelon).
