Magic, mystery and adventure abound in these tales chosen from more than four decades of writing. Out of more than 300 published stories, Ralph E. Vaughan has chosen these as some of his best and has provided an introduction to each story. Among the characters you will meet are a swordswoman trying to live by the old ways as the world is transformed by the new metal-iron, a young girl taken from the lands across the sea who is always turning homeward, and a man who wanders the Cemetery Earth beneath a dying sun. The tales in this large (nearly 150,000 words) collection explore such diverse themes as alienation, faith, alternate history, interstellar colonization, the end of the Bronze Age, and the entropic death of the universe.