I hope you all enjoyed last weeks 10 Year Anniversary Edition of the blog, but now it is on to a new week and the start of GA's 11th year! To start us off we're taking a look back at a story written for the 2007 Winter Anthology: Worth Fighting For. I hope you enjoy Dark's review of "Red's Rescue" written by Lugh. Enjoy and if you decide to check out the story, why not leave him a review!

Review by Dark
Status: Complete
Word Count: 10,042

This is a story by one of our more prolific writers. It’s almost overwhelming visiting Lugh’s story page because there are so many to choose from! But I found this particular story perusing the anthology list. Red’s Rescue was written for the 2007 anthology Worth Fighting For. It’s one of only a few that have an actual description and yes, I knew that Lugh’s been a member of GA for a long time, but to see how active he was even 5 years ago surprised me. I wanted to see if his writing was just as captivating then as now.

Although the beginning leads the reader to believe that the main character Ayreon is only in town to have fun, it is later revealed that he’s there for a specific purpose. His father trains boys to serve a secretive assassin’s guild. It was a little worrisome that Ayreon never noticed any of this happening as he was growing up.

At any rate, I loved the set-up and descriptions as Ayreon plays the games masquerading as trials for entry into the city’s guilds. One of the things I liked best is how Ayreon is not perfect. He does well in some things and doesn’t fare so well in others. There’s something mysterious lurking behind the storyline that intrigued me from the start. Ayreon is sweetly innocent but not naïve. The plot takes a short detour into training, which brings to mind that training sequence you always get in sports movies and it catapults the plot to Ayreon’s first mission. Here is where the plot answers the question of why Ayreon? There were so many ways for the story to end that I didn’t know which one to root for. I loved how it kept me guessing.

Lugh does a fabulous job of bringing the reader along from beginning to end. The font is kind of in-your-face, but that probably happened during the transfer from efiction to GAstories. The mysteries are expertly woven into the plot and the end leaves the reader wishing for more. Here’s a story that I would love to see expanded into a novella someday.

Readers who love fantasy will love this hidden gem about what’s really worth fighting for. And it gives a whole new meaning to the war of the roses.

Hope you enjoyed this review as much as I did, and if you've read a story by any author here at GA that you want to bring attention to, then let us know! We're more than happy for any reviews that come our way and if the story hasn't already been reviewed for the blog, then we can feature it on an upcoming Monday or Wednesday.