Anticausal: Elcano and the Scepter of Priam

Five hundred years ago, the first man to sail around the world hid a secret. A prophecy says she will be the one to find it.Chloe Santillana is in no hurry. A doctoral student in Valladolid, she chose a thesis on the Age of Exploration mostly to protect the quiet, comfortable life she already has - until, deep in the national archive, she unfolds a parchment that was never meant to leave it. It is the transcript of a secret interrogation. Five centuries ago, Emperor Charles I questioned Juan Sebastián Elcano - the Basque sailor who closed the first circle around the globe in 1522 - about three of the lost Pignora Imperii, the sacred objects Rome once believed kept its empire standing: the scepter of Priam, the veil of Iliona, and the ashes of Orestes. And it sets down a prophecy: that three men, led by a single woman, will be the ones to recover them. The woman's name is Chloe Santillana. What begins as a footnote becomes a slow, magnetic pull northward - into the rain-soaked coast and old stone churches of the Basque Country, beside a man she never expected to meet and a historian who knows far too much - toward a revelation that quietly overturns everything Chloe takes for granted about time, about cause and effect, and about what any of it is for. Anticausal is a slow-burning, atmospheric mystery that braids real history, ancient myth, and one genuinely disquieting idea into the opening movement of a trilogy - about the secrets empires keep, and the price of being chosen to uncover them. For readers who love intelligent, slow-burn mysteries where scholarship tips into obsession, and the buried past refuses to stay buried.

Pagina's: 306, Paperback, Independently published