I hope you are enjoying the festive season. To make my title just a little more original, I've changed it to something that more or less has the same effect. 'The Fate of Many, Return of One' is a title that I feel is more descriptive of the theme I wanted to press forward with. This work started off as a vague idea in my head, but it eventually grew into something much larger than I should have let it.
The sequel (and hopefully my last extensive work on the series) is titled 'Victory and Light'. As I noted before, it is meant to be Yin to the Yang of this series. There will be action but there will also be an emotional reckoning for Gregor and Luxa as they figure out what exactly they will mean to each other and how far they must go to be where they want. I am about fifty thousand words into it, and will probably start publishing very soon, editing and posting a batch of chapters each week until we reach the end.
I improved on the title art (in my opinion), trying to balance the symbology of the crown, the gun, the armor, and the green of Poison. The cover image for 'Victory and Light is more understated, and I look forward to being able to share it along with the conclusion to this story soon.
Until then, let me leave you with a brief explanation about the people who ambushed Luxa and Gregor in Central Park:
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The threat of nuclear war in the last century demanded ways to keep the citizenry safe. Massive shelters were excavated under New York, large concrete boxes extending just off of the subway lines. One of these passages had an entrance near Central Park. As time went on and the bombs never dropped, maintenance crews began seeing things. Rats larger than men, giant cockroaches, and more.
The reports were passed up the chain of command until someone got the FBI to check it out. Using state-of-the-art sonar equipment, a very extensive cavern system was discovered. When lethally-hostile creatures were discovered as well, the surviving FBI agents refused to investigate further, on the grounds that supernatural occurrences were not in their jurisdiction.
Fortunately, there was a quasi-governmental unit just coming into existence who found the supernatural very much in their jurisdiction. As the world became connected through telephone lines and radio waves, it became clear to multiple influential people that Earth was not as mundane as we thought it was. Certifiable proof was being found of portals between worlds, forgotten creatures under New York City, superhuman abilities, and more. Elements from across NATO soon formed a group that would catalog and control these events and keep them safe from Soviet control. By 1991, the group had expanded to more than a hundred countries.
Operating in utter secrecy and almost entirely independent of each other, small cells of personnel keep the daily illusion of the normal world going by monitoring abnormalities and shielding them from the public eye in the interest of civic peace.