Changes

Only a little while has passed since we last spent time with [[Glass Thorns - Touchstone by Melanie Rawn|Touchstone]], the touring theatre company that not only shows the audience the performance, but enables them to experience, feel and taste it as a 4D hallucination. This time they're being taken beyond their comfort zone as they're cornered into escorting a princess home from the foreign Continent. Meanwhile Cade Silversun is still getting his 'Elsewhens': the premonitions of alternative futures that come as nightmares and daydreams. Yes, Elsewhens, those things that warned him about a woman; the same woman that friend and colleague Mieka Windthistle is in love with. Indeed, Touchstone is forced to cope with foreign travel, foreign attitudes and, for some of them, the feeling that all isn't as it should be.

It may start a little more slowly than its predecessor (and please don't skip the prologue or you'll regret it), but it's soon moving along at full pelt. We begin to understand Cade more and realise why he keeps his 'Elsewhens' (Mieka's word) to himself. Indeed it makes perfect sense and has stopped me shouting 'Tell him!' at certain passages. However, this retention of information isn't doing him any good and the booze and self-medication with the coloured thorns increase. Mieka also ups his intake, leading to real life comparisons of creatives and their need to anaesthetise or stimulate artificially.