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The Chronicles of the Heralds
The Stone Garden
Book One · 15 sample pages
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Prologue: The First City
The first city burned between two rivers.
A scribe ran through its western quarter with a clay tablet against his chest. His left leg had been broken years before and had healed crooked. Fire crossed the roofs above him. Men fought at the wells. Soldiers from the palace killed anyone who tried to leave through the river gate.
The tablet held no prayer and no praise for the king. It held measurements for a weapon built that morning in the temple yard. The weapon had failed. The king had walked through it, killed the three people operating it, and ordered every copy of its design destroyed.
The scribe had kept one.
Prologue: The First City
The first city burned between two rivers.
A scribe ran through its western quarter with a clay tablet against his chest. His left leg had been broken years before and had healed crooked. Fire crossed the roofs above him. Men fought at the wells. Soldiers from the palace killed anyone who tried to leave through the river gate.
The tablet held no prayer and no praise for the king. It held measurements for a weapon built that morning in the temple yard. The weapon had failed. The king had walked through it, killed the three people operating it, and ordered every copy of its design destroyed.
The scribe had kept one.
He reached a dry cistern as the roof of the record house fell into the street. A dead woman lay beside the opening. He wrapped the tablet in her wool shawl and dropped it into the dark. Then a palace spear entered his back. He fell across the cistern mouth and died before the soldier could see what he had hidden.
On the hill beyond the eastern wall, a red-haired man watched the city go down. He had given the scribe the design. He had also warned him that it might fail. When the palace roof collapsed, the man lowered his head.
The king left before dawn. He wore a dead guard's cloak and carried no crown. The people who met him on the north road saw an injured traveler. None of them saw what he had become.
The tablet remained beneath the city. Centuries passed. Mud filled the streets, the rivers changed course, and new people built houses above the ruins.
Then a woman climbed into the cistern and found the marks pressed into the clay.
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That is the opening.
The rest runs five thousand years, from the first city that ever burned to a war still going on underneath recorded history. Book One is finished. Get on the list and you will know the moment it is buyable.
More samples coming
The Rebirth trilogy and The Herald Reborn are next
Openings from Aries, Aphrodite and Harmonia will go up here as each one is ready to show.