Their Only Hope was the Villain! Here is the stunning conclusion to Nebula Award nominee Emil Petaja's science fictional retelling of the Finnish epic, The Kalevala. Millennia ago the Vanhat fled their dying world, Otava, and settled on Earth, in an icy, unwanted peninsula in the far north, where they became known as the Finns. Once the Vanhat had been a mighty people, possessors of an ancient knowledge, whose cosmic heroes and heroines gave battle to dark forces from beyond our universe. In the distant future, humankind has scattered to the stars, and only a remnant still dwell on and abandoned, ransacked Earth, among them, the Vanhat. For a prophecy has long predicted that in this age Otava would bloom again and the time of the Great Return would be at hand when the exiled Vanhat could reclaim the world that gave them birth. But their most ancient and bitter enemy, the sinister being known as Louhi, the starwitch, has waited eons for this moment and laid careful plans to destroy to the Vanhat on the very eve of the Great Return. Her carefully chosen and honed tool: the most despised being in the universe, Kullervo, the tramontane, the cosmic outcast. Touched in his mother's womb by an evil entity from another dimension, all other living beings, animal, human and Vanhat alike, are instinctively repulsed by him. Kullervo has been on a rampage of destruction since birth. He is a creature who thirsts for revenge on the grand scale, and Louhi has instilled within him the power to destroy an entire race, the Vanhat, forever! Kullervo gloats at the thought. He is the last one anybody would pick for the hero of the piece. Unexpected and deeply moving, Tramontane is a fitting conclusionto Emile Petaja's quartet of cosmic fantasies.

Emil Petaja (1915 – 2000) was an American science fiction and fantasy writer whose career spanned seven decades. He was the author of 13 published novels, nearly 150 short stories, numerous poems, and a handful of books and articles on various subjects. Though he wrote science fiction, fantasy, horror stories, detective fiction, and poetry, Petaja considered his work part of an older tradition of “weird fiction.” You can find echoes not only of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard in his work, but previous generations of weird authors such as Poe, Blackwood, and E.F. Benson. This volume includes 10 stories and a poem.