Azure Bonds

Azure Bonds

Cover of first edition Artwork by Clyde Caldwell
Author	Kate Novak & Jeff Grubb
Cover artist	Clyde Caldwell
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Finders Stone Trilogy
Genre	Fantasy novel
Publisher	TSR, Inc.
Publication date	October, 1988
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	380
ISBN
OCLC	18910805
LC Class	CPB Box no. 1733 vol. 4
Followed by	The Wyvern's Spur

Azure Bonds is a fantasy novel written by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb, originally published in 1988. It is the opening novel of the Finder’s Stone Trilogy which is set within the world of the Forgotten Realms. It served as the basis for the computer game, Curse of the Azure Bonds. The novel was awarded 3 stars in a review by OtherRealms. One of the co-authors, Jeff Grubb, stated that of the novels he has written, Azure Bonds is one of his favorites.

In 1984, while Jeff Grubb was managing the Forgotten Realms setting, "I had a concept for a novel that mixed sword-and-sorcery with mystery and personal discovery - the tale of a woman who wakes up one morning with no knowledge of her immediate past and a set of strange tattoos on her arms.

"I laid out the novel one night to my wife, Kate Novak, while we were driving from Lake Geneva [Wisconsin] to Milwaukee. By the time we got there, I had a co-writer."

The trilogy’s titular “finder’s stone” plays a relatively limited role and has an essentially introductory presence in the novel.

The story begins with the main character, an adventurer named Alias, awakening in a disoriented and amnesic state. She soon discovers that she has a newly acquired azure colored tattoo imprinted on the inside of her sword arm in the space between her wrist and elbow. At first she attributes her memory loss to inebriation and the tattoo as a drunken prank by companions. She soon finds that the tattoo is magical in origin, resists attempts to remove it and most worryingly, exerts a power to compel her actions.

Before long, Alias becomes the nucleus of a disparate party of adventurers: a mysterious lizard-creature named Dragonbait, a southern mage called Akabar Bel Akash, and a halfling "bard" named Olive Ruskettle. The novel's plot follows the actions of the party which are combinations of the group’s investigations and interruptions caused by the compulsions of the tattoo.

It is later revealed that Alias herself is in fact a complicated, magically created, artificial being intended by her creators to be their proxy in various nefarious purposes. The tattoo was to be a means of control as well as a branding of ownership by each of the collaborating parties involved in her creation. Her long term memories were actually granted to her by her sole benign (but misled) creator and her short term memory loss is due in part to the gap between the end of her artificial memories and her premature awakening.