Books of Alexey Pekhov - one of the most popular modern Russian-speaking fantasy writers

Series: Guard #1

Where princes and clerics, inquisitors and sorcerers cannot cope with evil, the students of the Brotherhood of Guardians are called to help. People with the gift, capable of seeing the invisible and stopping dark entities. Ludwig van Normayenne is one of them. A free hunter of the creatures of darkness, he travels from principality to principality, ridding the world of evil souls. Work awaits him wherever inexplicable events, cruel pestilence and strange, unexpected deaths occur.

It's hard to run away from your past. To do this, you will have to overcome many difficulties and find yourself on the other side of the world, in a country of warm sun, gentle ocean and tropical islands. Where air pirates and dashing captains roam the sky, robbery and smuggling flourish, rum flows like a river and everyone respects flyers. In a world on the border of the Upside Down, dizzying adventures and miracles await all fortune hunters.

The cataclysm split the once United Kingdom into many duchies. Magic destroyed the familiar world, great wizards fell, heroes were brought to their knees, and beggars sat on thrones. A thousand years after these events, time mixed truth and lies, giving the descendants of the survivors a new god - ignorance. Lethos is a dark land on the outskirts of a crippled world, where night brings misfortune and the dead hunt the living. It is in this duchy that the paths of heroes converge, who should revive myths and legends. To remember the past. Or forget him forever.

Sleep is something we need constantly. A person can live without food for a month, without water for a week; if he is completely deprived of sleep, he goes crazy on the fifth day and dies. In the world of dreams, the laws of morality, human society and the state do not apply. Sleep is not limited in space and time; a minute here easily stretches to a year, and a month is compressed to a second. It is limitless and eternal, capturing entire continents, universes and millennia. Capable of crumbling at the touch of a butterfly's wing, and the loudest scream cannot destroy it.
In dreams we are helpless and omnipotent. Monsters and the most beautiful creatures lurk in it. This is a time of relaxation, brilliant discoveries, dreams come true, unimaginable nightmares, pleasure, illusions, healing, peace, death.
Neither people, nor animals, nor gods can resist his power...

They are the ones who live underground, in air, water and fire. Those who steal our thoughts and wander through our dreams feed on our fears and desires. Lies, truth, reality, nightmares and fiction are subject to them. The true rulers of this world. The strongest are trying to resist. The weak flee or die. But never on their way did they meet someone who was able to understand. To come to an agreement with them

They are the ones who blow out the fire in our hearths. Those who squeak floorboards in old houses. They live in the hollows of dead trees, squeak with mouse-like voices and look out from the collapsed windows of ruined temples. They are the spirits that rule this world, and people are just a hindrance to their pranks, toys in their hands... They laugh at us, but they are afraid of those whom they call spellcasters