Their Only Hope was the
Villain!
Here is the stunning conclusion to Nebula Award nominee Emil
Petaja's science fictional retelling of the Finnish epic, The Kalevala.
Millennia ago the Vanhat fled their dying world, Otava, and settled on
Earth, in an icy, unwanted peninsula in the far north, where they became known as the Finns. Once the Vanhat had been a mighty people,
possessors of an ancient knowledge, whose cosmic heroes and heroines
gave battle to dark forces from beyond our universe. In the distant
future, humankind has scattered to the stars, and only a remnant still
dwell on and abandoned, ransacked Earth, among them, the Vanhat. For a
prophecy has long predicted that in this age Otava would bloom again and the time of the Great Return would be at hand when the exiled Vanhat
could reclaim the world that gave them birth. But their most ancient and bitter enemy, the sinister being known as Louhi, the starwitch, has
waited eons for this moment and laid careful plans to destroy to the
Vanhat on the very eve of the Great Return. Her carefully chosen and
honed tool: the most despised being in the universe, Kullervo, the
tramontane, the cosmic outcast. Touched in his mother's womb by an evil
entity from another dimension, all other living beings, animal, human
and Vanhat alike, are instinctively repulsed by him. Kullervo has been
on a rampage of destruction since birth. He is a creature who thirsts
for revenge on the grand scale, and Louhi has instilled within him the
power to destroy an entire race, the Vanhat, forever! Kullervo gloats at the thought. He is the last one anybody would pick for the hero of the
piece. Unexpected and deeply moving, Tramontane is a fitting
conclusionto Emile Petaja's quartet of cosmic fantasies.
