The Mirror of Origins

When Luca Marin was eleven, an unlocked door beneath the Vatican led him to a mirror that did not reflect the present.Each touch cast him for one hour into a lost age: Mesopotamia before the Flood, ancient Egypt, and a civilization erased long before recorded history. But the mirror did more than reveal the past. It marked Luca as a Witness-and made him the quarry of an order that has guarded humanity's oldest secret for centuries.Years later, a trail of vanished children and impossible memories leads him to Vespera, a fortress hidden in the Slovenian mountains. Inside waits Elara, an imprisoned princess raised to become the living key to a machine older than civilization. Her bloodline has been protected, controlled, and used for generations. Now she is running out of time.To free her, Luca must uncover the truth behind the world's oldest religions, the forgotten beings once worshipped as gods, and the drowned civilization whose technology could reshape humanity. But the intelligence waiting beneath the past knows his grief, speaks with the voices of the dead, and has spent millennia learning how to escape.Luca can move unseen, walk through walls, and enter moments history has forgotten. None of those gifts may be enough to save Elara-or prevent an ancient power from awakening.Some histories were buried to protect the world.This one is ready to wake.