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354 pages

English

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Description

While excavating in the mountains of Kurdistan for evidence of an ancient, widespread flood, Dr Maria Sombarte instead unearths a relic she had spent much of her career discrediting.

Now, she must find her colleague and rival Anthony Waterman, who has vanished in the darkness of the Brazilian Amazon.

Meanwhile, in Russia, Chief Inspector Vassallo is tasked with finding the terrorist responsible for the attempted assassination of a bishop, favoured by many to be chosen as the next Pope.

Sujets

Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)

Adventure

Fiction

Action

Fantasy

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Publié par	Xlibris AU
Date de parution	07 juin 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9798369491638
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

D Ξ L Ц G Ξ

Lucas Lex DeJong

Copyright © 2023 by Lucas Lex DeJong.
Library of Congress Control Number:
2023909124
ISBN:
Hardcover
979-8-3694-9165-2

Softcover
979-8-3694-9164-5

eBook
979-8-3694-9163-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/06/2023

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CONTENTS
I N T R Θ I T
Jove
К Y R I Σ
Urartu
Sanguine
Byzantium
Convalescence
India
Tenement
Manaus
The Novitiate
Suspect
Terpetov the Witness
Captive
Anthony
S Λ N C T V S
Prayer
Herald
Fortress
Terpetov the Witness
Harrow
The Novitiate
Redeemer
L I B Σ R Λ
Nikuya
Interregnum
Respite
Siderius
A Dialogue
Departure
The Novitiate
Pelopia
University
Terpetov the Witness
A Dialogue
Westhead
Mace
L Λ C R Y M Θ S Λ
A D 1310
Veritas
Lecture
Dolorosa
Terpetov the Witness
A Dialogue
Tempest
The Novitiate
Fade
Wormwood
Inanna
L V X Æ T V R N Λ
Deep
Goetia
The Novitiate
Rome
A Dialogue
Sanctum
Judea
Thanatos
Đ I Σ S I RÆ
Skáld
Heresiarch
Threnody
MAGNU M INCENDIU M ROMÆ
Ɍ Σ Q V I Σ M
Afterword
Revelation
Of Canon & Creed
References
Synopsis

D Ξ L Ц G Ξ tells a standalone story set in mankind’s eleventh hour.
Within these pages, characters and events from some of my previous works provide much of the context for the plot of this novel. Ideally, it would be prudent to have read Pyre , Harrow , and Unmapped Darkness before beginning this novel, so that the impact of events portrayed here is fully appreciated. However, I strove to ensure that all essential information is provided to the reader within this story, so that it may be read on its own.
If you have not read the aforementioned novels, or if it has been a while, you may turn to the very back of this book. On the final page you will find a short synopsis of the previous three books, and the crucial context which is to be raised in this novel.
Be warned, however, that highlighting these crucial details inevitably spoils their eventual revelation here.
To those who have followed this saga from its inception:
This one is dedicated to you.

I have told you before it comes,
so that when it does come to pass,
ye might believe.
- J O H N 14:29

I N T R Θ I T
Jove
T he oldest and largest storm in the heavens was changing. First observed more than three hundred years ago, none can say when it first formed. It may have preceded us. Most thought it would outlive us. Inspecting the night welkin through one of the largest telescopes available to man, Patrice Shikongo felt the familiar quickening of awe and shame. Awe; for the sheer majesty of creation. Shame… Well, shame was nothing new.
She was a product of two worlds: old and new. In the past, she had always taken the position that there was wisdom in the Old Beliefs, but that it suffered from being unstructured. As time went on, however, she found it harder and harder to reconcile that position with her career. Patrice relished in structure. It was what led her to study atmospheric physics. Weather events – long feared by man as unpredictable and unknowable – could be reduced to physical modelling. When she had run her first global El Niño simulation and accurately predicted every major storm for the following year (earning her a doctorate and more grant money than she could ever know how to spend), it felt like peeking behind the curtain at God’s design. That the term tempestuous implied unpredictability now amused her.
Her family would ask about her work, of course, and Father would opine at every opportunity, gently but insistently reminding her that true wisdom could not be found on computer screens, or in the eyepiece of a telescope.
Her assistant Shane was little better. A graduate student from the United Kingdom, he could not help but find himself explaining Patrice’s own work to her. She tried to view it in a generous light: he was young, precocious, and eager to prove himself to her. Still, she couldn’t help but hear condescending undertones. She didn’t think it was deliberate, or even conscious. He had volunteered to work under her, back when she was just a name on a publication, and Namibia was just a romantic hypothetical. He was useful, though, and what he had lacked in meteorology, he made up for in astronomy.
Pivoting her study from earthly storms to heavenly ones had sent the climatology community reeling. The modelling developed by Dr Patrice Shikongo was probably the biggest breakthrough in the field since the modelling of ancient CO 2 from ice cores. That she had turned her interest away from global weather forecasting, and instead used the carte blanche grant money to set up shop in the Brukkaros Mountain Observatory, gave birth to all kinds of speculatory gossip. Was the model just pure luck, and she was afraid that she couldn’t follow it up? Was the research a dead-end, the limits of the modelling already established? Had she plagiarised her work? For such an innovation to have come from a young woman raised in a rural African village, after all…
The truth was far simpler, and far too personal for Patrice to openly discuss. The truth was that astronomy was always her first love, and her home of Namibia possessed some of the clearest skies on the planet. Patrice had never taken them for-granted. From the moment she could walk she was running away from her parents, seeking the high ground away from the village lights, gazing in awe at the effervescent beauty of the Milky Way. She had mapped the heavens with her own invented constellations before she could even read. Volunteers from an NGO had first taken notice of her at age seven, when she could point out which apparent stars were actually planets, for they moved each night against the sempiternal tapestry. From there, doors opened, scholarships were granted, and she was guided towards study with more tangible applications.
Namibia suffered the droughts of climate change worse than many places in the world. The young Patrice Shikongo had become a voice for the condemned generation, and a prodigy in the fight for our common survival. Now, in the hour of her greatest achievement, she had turned her eyes upwards. And what she had seen sent as many shockwaves through the astronomical community as her previous work had sent through the meteorological.
The oldest and largest storm in the heavens was changing.
Patrice Shikongo had applied her tempestuous modelling to the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. It was the greatest challenge of her career; there was just so much different about a storm on a gas giant. That the Jovian storm had raged for hundreds (or thousands) of years is owed largely to the absence of a terrestrial surface. There is no friction on Jupiter which might drag a cyclone to a halt. Even with wind-speeds of more than four-hundred kilometres per hour, it takes six Earth days to complete a rotation, and could swallow our planet multiple times over.
She had accounted for the increased gravitational pull, and the hundred-million X-rays worth of radiation emitted from its mass. She had accounted for every piece of data gleamed from nearly four-hundred years of observation, and then she checked and re-checked the data dozens of times. Every time, the same result.
The Great Jovian Storm was breaking up. Flaking had been observed for a number of years, but it could not be determined how deep the phenomena occurred within the storm, or what the effect would be. Now, Patrice Shikongo had the data. Sometime very soon, the Great Red Spot – which had watched humanity ever since humanity could first observe the deep heavens – would end. It was a monumental discovery, and the first person whom she told – aside from Shane, who had helped to validate her work – had been Father.
From her father, the word had spread like brushfire. It did not matter that her people had never seen the Jovian storm, except in NASA’s photos, or that no story from the Old Beliefs had ever mentioned anything of its kind. It was enough that they knew that there was now a change in the heavens, and change was almost always bad.
Here Patrice found herself, trapped between two worlds. Between the unmitigated praise of the international scientific community of which she was part, and the fearful condemnation of her village. Trapped between sky and earth.
Now, Father had