"Each new day I’ve let the tides of avarice pull my ship away from shore and out into the seas of adventure…" So says Captain Terrigan Rustbane, the most dreaded pirate in Sagaria, whose greed and cruelty have led him on the course of destruction and mayhem chronicled in John Dahlgren's adventure The Tides of Avarice. Yet when these tides sweep up an unlikely hero, they can alter the fate of an entire world, setting the courses of many lives upon new paths of self-discovery, freedom, and redemption.
Sylvester Lemmington is living a quiet life in Foxglove as Junior Archivist and Translator of Ancient Tongues. He works at transcribing the scrolls that detail the Great Exoduses of the lemmings over the “Mighty Enormous Cliff to the Land of Destiny Across the Great Wet Without End,” in one of which his father took part long ago, never to return. He considers himself too bookish and timid to ever win the heart of Viola, his best friend and true love, and tries to resign himself to her marriage to the odious Mayor Hairbell. But everything in his small world begins to change one night when he rescues a stranger from drowning. The wounded ferret tells him of the lands across the sea from which he came, destroying Sylvester’s perception of the world taught to him by his religion. It also leads him to question all his beliefs despite warnings that speaking his questions aloud could land him a place in the next Great Exodus.
The stranger, known as Keelhaul Levantes, also gives him a crumpled piece of parchment sought after by the dangerous man who gave Levantes his fatal wound. A few days later, a strange gray fox arrives in Foxglove asking about Levantes, and soon Captain Terrigan Rustbane and his band of pirates are wreaking havoc in search of the parchment, which contains the final piece of a map which will lead to the treasure of the Zindars. When Terrigan learns he has the map, Sylvester, along with Viola and her mother, is kidnapped by the pirates and forced into a perilous journey in search of the treasure.
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