Katie Cash

            Lucy Barnes was a sixteen-year-old junior at Frostbite High. She lived in the cozy, snowy town of Algid with her father and two brothers, Mack and Luke. Like most people in Algid, the Barnes family led a simple life. After all, the last thing anyone wanted to do was be different enough to be noticed by their oppressive government, the Commune.

            Lucy received the shock of a lifetime one chilly morning when a Commune official showed up at Frostbite High to inform her that she was the heir to a secret, magical map. She was to become the Mapkeeper, an individual appointed by the map itself to wield the map’s power and travel between the world she’d always known and a parallel universe called Praxis.

            Balking against the idea of it, Lucy attempted to rid herself of the map… but she found efforts to rid herself of the map to be fruitless. Before she knew it, Lucy and her brothers found themselves at the heart of an assortment of mysteries and dangers alongside newfound friends in Praxis. As Mapkeeper, she was expected to learn to harness the power of the map to help stop the dark magic of the Wardens, an ancient group whose centuries-dormant power was stirring once again. She was introduced to the leader of each creature clan at the first Council of Clans, where she surprised her doubters—and herself—with her first major feat.

            Natural disasters continued to occur in Praxis, and time was running short as Lucy struggled to gain control over the map’s seemingly random spurts of magic. But as each day passed, the dangers mounted, and Lucy was forced to cling even tighter to her most trusted friends while desperately seeking to uncover her enemies and their motives.

            The stirrings of the Wardens’ dark magic reached their culmination when the Wardens launched an attack against all the other creatures of Praxis. Lucy and her brothers joined the unified front of Praxis, where centaurs and gnomes, elves and dwarves, and humans and goblins all put aside their vast differences and united to defend their homeland. A ferocious battle ensued, and Lucy was forced to push herself to her limits, discovering within herself courage and focus that she never knew she possessed. But in the end, it was the map that the Wardens sought, and Lucy found herself the sole target of the most terrifying group of creatures she could imagine…