The Shadow Dragons

Seven years after the events of The Shadow Dragons, John, Jack, and Charles are finally able to return to their beloved Archipelago of Dreams. But even as old friends celebrate their return, new concerns shadow the reunion: the threat of Ecthroi, primordial Shadow. And perhaps even worse, the apparent splintering of Time itself.

"There's an old myth in the Archipelago," he went on softly, shaking his head. "A legend, really...I recall it mentioned a Crusade, but those events happened seven centuries ago. We always thought it was only a story."

It has been nine years since John, Jack, and Charles had their great adventure in the Archipelago of Dreams and became the Caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica. Now they have been brought together again to solve a mystery: Someone is kidnapping the children of the Archipelago. And their only clue is a mysterious message delivered by a strange girl with artificial wings: "The Crusade has begun." Worse, they discover that all of the legendary Dragonships have disappeared as well.

The only chance they have to save the world from a centuries-old plot is to seek out the last of the Dragonships -- the Red Dragon -- in a spectacular journey that takes them from Sir James Barrie's Kensington Gardens to the Underneath of the Greek Titans of myth. With friends both familiar and new, they will travel through an extraordinary landscape where history, myth, and fable blend together to tell the oldest story in the world. And along the way, the Caretakers of the Geographica will discover that great deeds alone do not make heroes, and that growing up may be unavoidable...but growing old doesn't have to be.

On a September evening in 1931, John and Jack, two of the Caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica, discover a cryptic warning on a medieval manuscript -- which is not only addressed to them but seems to have been written by their friend, Hugo Dyson! But before they can discover the origin of the strange book, Hugo walks through a door in time -- and vanishes into the past.

And in that moment, the world begins to change.

The Frontier, which separates our world from the Archipelago of Dreams, has fallen. Dark and terrible beasts roam throughout England. No one can be summoned from the Archipelago. And both worlds have fallen into darkness under the reign of a cruel and terrible king.

The only hope to restore the proper order of things lies on a forgotten island at the edge of the Archipelago, where a time travel device left by Jules Verne must be used to race through history itself -- from the Bronze Age to ancient Alexandria and the founding of the Silver Throne -- in one night. And in that single night, John and Jack will find that the only way to save their friend and stop the chaos destroying the world is to solve a 2,000-year-old mystery: Who is the Cartographer?

Penetrating the cloud, the Starship crew is shocked to discover a world of knights and serfs lifted right out of Earth's Middle Ages. Ruthlessly exploiting the planet is a ring of intersellar trophy hunters preying on the immense, native dragon-lizards twentey-feet tall and armored like tanks.

The Caretakers are at war. The Archipelago of Dreams has fallen to the Echthroi, and the link to the Summer Country has been lost. The Keep of Time must be rebuilt, and the secret lies somewhere in Deep Time at the beginnings of the World, when the Summer Country and the Archipelago were one and the same. Fortunately, there is still hope: the Grail child, Rose Dyson, and the new Cartographer Edmund McGee have learned how to map time, and through a precarious balance of travel to the past and the future, they have a chance of repairing the present.