THANK YOU for downloading House of Refuge. As a reader, I know very well the huge number of other books competing for your attention, to say nothing of the demands of your busy life, so I sincerely appreciate that you're taking the time to even look at this book. As an author, it is enormously gratifying to find someone that not only shares some of my interests, but is interested in my own work.

Now, let's go on an adventure together.

The book you've just downloaded is part of this big, wonderful thing called Ascension Epoch. Ascension Epoch is a shared universe of stories, but it's also a platform for collaborative writing, a celebration of the public domain, and a guarantee of future openness. My wife and I started work on it a few years back after realizing we were probably never going to get a chance to write and illustrate comic books for the big publishers. We wanted to create something original, but still let other creatives make it their own without being walled into the ghetto of fan fiction. We also wanted to revive the wonderful creations of those great authors and artists who came before us and expose a new generation of readers to classics they might never have encountered. Ascension Epoch was the result, a shared universe for heroic adventure fiction (and many other types of fiction, too!), built on the public domain and released under Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike.

We love building this universe and we want to give it all the attention it deserves. To do that, we need your help. Consider tipping us a few dollars for this work, or buy one of our other books so that we can continue the project financially. Tell your friends about us. Leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or even your blog.  Write something of your own in the Ascension Epoch and expand the universe. Even emailing us and telling us what you thought of the book helps (nothing encourages writers more than knowing that people are actually reading their stuff!).

Thanks again for exploring the Ascension Epoch. We hope you like what you see and come back for more.