The Weirding Storm

The Weirding Storm is an epic poem. Witches, dragons, malevolent spirit animals, dire wolves, hate, war, community, peace, and love spill out of the lines in a dance of words.

After watching a young girl whose mother has died in the remote cottage below the dragon cliffs, a great dragon lands in front of a hunter from the nearest human village. Ssruuanne tries to tell Ruarther, the hunter, about the small human girl, but he sends an arrow bouncing uselessly off her scales. Her fiery breath sets a tree behind him alight, and the hunter runs, even though he had always told himself he would never quail before a dragon's power.

Thus begins an epic story poem flowing out of a witch's death into the courage of a young girl and the terrifying build-up to a dragon/human war. Dragons, in their immense caverns and tunnels, face extinction, searching desperately for a way to control young rebel males in their midst. Humans, in the village below where the young girl is left alone to face a brutal winter, struggle against the coming war. Desperate to escape war, they search for dormant arts and powers long denied. Then, as Wei, the young girl, achieves an impossible transformation, war and the realms of death loose dire wolves and a storm of extinction as an epic climax threatens humans and dragons alike even as the possibility for human and dragon redemption takes flight into winter skies.

Written in blank verse, or iambic pentameter, it is a formal epic featuring most of the elements that are characteristic of this ancient form of storytelling which has been around since the time of Beowulf and Homer's Odyssey. The Weirding includes an 'invocation' to the poetic muse, a hero's visit to the realms of death, and a story that encompasses a spirit so large it can be told only through a long poem.

"Thomas Davis has taken a literary form that goes all the way back to the great sagas of antiquity's oral literature, and fashioned a contemporary tale that will enthral both adults and their children. Davis has heard the song/Dredged from the ancient dragon memories and given us a story-poem that is part Beowulf and part Game of Thrones. Filled with witches, dragons, warriors, battles a wondrously stark universe comes to life in The Weirding Storm." Terence Winch, winner of the American Book Award and author of fifteen books of poetry and prose.

"In his epic poem, The Weirding Storm: A Dragon Epic, Thomas Davis discovers vivid and often stunning language to explore both ancient worlds and our present world with its ongoing cycles of death and resurgence, war and peace. Here you will find language and story that mesmerize the reader, that transport one to places where words and stories are born. This epic poem serves as a bridge between realms: substance and spirit, beast and human, reality and dream, none of which are separate in any moment of life." James Janko, winner Association of Writers and Writing Programs Prize for the Novel; author of Clubhouse Thief and Buffalo Boy and Geronimo.