Requiem for the Sun - Tapa dura

Three years after the formation of the fellowship described in the Rhapsody Trilogy, the empire is threatened by the death of the heirless Dowager Empress, a situation that is further complicated by the return of Rhapsody's presumed-dead nemesis. 75,000 first printing.

Elizabeth Haydon first began writing in the fourth grade. Writing a play was one option in a history assignment so, along with a couple of friends, she put on a fairly awful play she had written which was called The Clue in the Diary. Writing fiction became a dream at that point. She took courses in college, but didn't believe she would be able to make a living from it.
She had read C.S. Lewis as a young child, J.R.R. Tolkien as an older one, and some fantasy in college, but had lost touch with the field after that. She was working in educational publishing in 1994 when she met up with an editorial friend and mentor in New Orleans at the American Library Association conference. He asked her to write for him a fantasy that might cross over to other genres and contain some of their shared mutual interests: medieval music, history, anthropology, and herbalism among others. Since they had been drinking Dixie Blackened Voodoos, she was initially hesitant to take on the project, worried that he might have been a bit tipsy when he suggested it. But when it became clear he really wanted her to do it, The Symphony of Ages was born.

These novels have made numerous "Best of the Year" as well as national bestseller lists. The Romantic Times called it "an epic saga worthy of Eddings, Goodkind & Jordan". A harpist and madrigal singer, Elizabeth Haydon lives on the East Coast with her husband and three children, where she is writing fantasy novels for both The Symphony of Ages for adults and the Adventures of Ven Polypheme for children.