The saga in order, chapter by chapter: La Sua Origine, The Army of Light, Ricardo Monteoro and After Dawn.
Book 1La Sua Origine
Tuscany, 1492. Cristian D’ San Fernald II is born into a world where gods and demons walk among men in human form, hidden behind noble names and ancient prisms. Orphaned at fourteen when a demon burns his parents alive, he becomes a soldier, then the trusted counsellor of the Brasco family.
In Scotland he meets Elizabeth Gloucester, heir to the royal blood of Siena, and falls in love. But her father wants her married to a god, and Dionysus, god of wine and pleasure and member of the Celestial Union, wants her for himself. Left for dead by Dionysus, Cristian is offered a pact from the darkness: the power to win her back, for half of his soul.
To become human again he must take four souls darkened by sin: a warlord in Japan, a pirate in Newfoundland, a pharaoh who hid from death in Egypt, and a king who cheated death in the lost city of Romania.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Triangle of Misfortune
Tuscany, April 20, 1492. The noble families of central Italy gather to celebrate the birth of Cristian D' San Fernald II, firstborn of the celebrated Christian writer Cristian D' San Fernald I and of Esther Giovenili, the French singer her admirers call the Queen of Soprano. Esther sets her career aside to raise him, and the night ends in a quarrel between the proud father and Esther's brother, Rosellio Giovenili, a tinkerer from Florence who adores his sister and his new nephew.
London, May 11, 1495. Margaret Dwarson, eldest daughter of Queen Carmen Peterwood and first in line to the crown of Siena, gives birth to a golden-haired girl she names Elizabeth, after her grandmother. For her husband, Duke Giovanni Gloucester of Durham, the child is more than a joy: through Margaret he is about to become king of Siena.
The next morning Margaret bleeds to death in her bed. With her dies Giovanni's claim to the throne, which passes to her younger sister, Leonore Dwarson. Margaret is buried in the garden of the royal castle of Siena, and when the mourners leave, Giovanni stays alone in the rain and curses God the Father. In that moment a darkness takes root in his soul, and he swears to win back what he believes was his by right: the crown of Siena.
Chapter 2
Chapter 2
The Last Song of Esther Giovenili
Young Cristian grows up with a gift for engineering, like his uncle Rosellio, but his father wants a swordsman. He sends the boy to train with his oldest friend, Sir Henry Brasco, the undefeated warrior known as the Hunter of the Black Gods, whose wife Helen and little son Marcus treat Cristian as one of their own.
When Count Sherman of Scotland invites Esther to sing at his son's engagement, she returns to the stage after fifteen years and triumphs. That night, on the train to Edinburgh, she sings for the passengers until the train leaves its rails and crashes into another. The wreck burns. Cristian I pulls his wife from the flames, and inside the carriage a rift opens: a faceless servant of Reficul offers to save them both in exchange for their son's soul.
They refuse. Knowing that whoever dies by a demon's hand belongs to the darkness forever, Cristian I drives his letter knife into Esther's heart with a prayer that sends her soul to Heaven. Before he can do the same to himself, the demon burns him alive and vanishes. At fourteen, Cristian D' San Fernald II is an orphan.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3
The Lonely Orphan
With no money to keep the family residence, Cristian goes to live with Rosellio in Florence. A year later, wanting a better life than an old mechanic's workshop can give, he joins the armies of Florence. Everything Henry Brasco taught him pays off, and his military career lasts twelve brilliant years.
When it ends, Rosellio tells him that Henry has been looking for him. The Hunter of the Black Gods is now one of the most powerful men in Tuscany, close to its king, and he makes Cristian a royal counsellor. In his free hours Cristian teaches the art of the sword in the same hall where he learned it.
Henry sees what the years have not healed. Sitting with Cristian in the old training hall, he shares what he heard while Cristian was away about the night of the crash, and that it was no accident. Cristian decides to sail to Scotland and find out the truth about his parents' death.
Chapter 4
Chapter 4
Fridays in the Valley
Lost in the streets of Scotland, Cristian literally runs into Elizabeth Gloucester. For the first time since he was a boy he feels something other than grief, and she feels the same. Elizabeth knows the land well, and she takes him to the place where his parents died. To comfort him, she tells him her own story: a mother who died two days after she was born, a crown that passed to her aunt Leonore, and a father who never accepted it.
They promise to meet every Friday in the valleys of Tuscany. Fridays become a first kiss, then a courtship. But Duke Giovanni notices his daughter's mysterious outings, and he throws a feast for the gods of the Celestial Union, hoping one of them will want her. The gods will not mix their blood with mortals. All except one: Dionysus, god of wine and pleasure, who cannot take his eyes off her.
Dionysus follows Elizabeth everywhere, and out of fear she stops going to the valley. At first her cousin Ruth Perrish, heir of Queen Leonore, goes in her place to make excuses. Then not even Ruth can come, and Cristian, heartbroken, stops waiting. When Elizabeth finally confronts Dionysus and returns to the valley, Cristian is gone. She searches for days until she finds him. He will not listen, so she kisses him, takes his hand, and that night she gives herself to him for the first time.
Chapter 5
Chapter 5
The Foreign God
Elizabeth has an idea as bold as it is dangerous: Cristian will ask for her hand as a god, a foreign god from a distant province. Her father, overjoyed, agrees to her one condition: no god of the Union may be invited, since the gods do not approve of such unions. The engagement dinner is a triumph, and nobody suspects a thing. Except Dionysus, who hears the rumor and knows that no god but himself would ever marry a mortal.
That night, on the docks near the valley, Cristian chooses the brightest star in the sky and swears that as long as it shines, his love will live. Elizabeth answers that not even death will take her love from him. They seal a promise in blood, and spend a night and a day hidden in an old hut while the rain falls.
On their way back to the Gloucester mansion, Dionysus is waiting in the dark with his human servants. Cristian cuts down every one of them, but no man can stand against a god of the Celestial Union. Dionysus breaks him, leaves him bleeding on the docks and carries Elizabeth back to her father to expose the lie.
Chapter 6
Chapter 6
Half a Soul
Dying in the dark, Cristian hears a voice inside his head. It belongs to Azazel, once a god of the dead, stripped of his Prism for betraying the gods and condemned to live as a faceless demon among the shadows. Azazel stops the bleeding and offers a deal: the power to defeat Dionysus and win Elizabeth back, in exchange for half of his soul.
Cristian accepts. His wounds close and the power flows in, but when he sees his reflection in the water he no longer looks human. He refuses to return to Elizabeth as a monster. Azazel explains that a divided soul cannot be joined again, only rebuilt, by absorbing other souls.
He hands Cristian a list of four names: four men whose souls are as black as night, because the power Azazel gave him is the power of darkness. If Cristian takes all four, he may become human again.
Chapter 7
Chapter 7
The Devil King of Owari
The first name leads to Japan. Cristian rides from Florence to the Black Sea, crosses Asia hidden in the dark, and boards a cargo ship to the province of Owari, where Oda Nobunaga, the warlord men call the Devil King, rules a fortress of steel. He killed his own brother to lead his clan.
The duel lasts for hours. Nobunaga awakens a dark power in his sword and covers himself in an enchanted black armor that protects his soul from being taken. Cristian, afraid for the first time that Azazel has set him a trap, feels something wake up inside him: a violet light in his eyes, and his animal essence taking shape at his side. It is Expher, half beast, half shadow, and from now on his companion.
Nobunaga falls and begs for mercy, and Cristian drives his blade into his heart. Absorbing the soul is agony. Visions he does not understand fill his head, and his heart darkens with the warlord's sins. But Nobunaga's dark power joins his own, and with it comes the art of the cursed armor.
Chapter 8
Chapter 8
The Huntress of the Forest
On his way to a different port, Cristian crosses an ancient forest and is surrounded by a pack of nomad demons, the Asura, led by Ferhenas. They believe he is a demon who escaped the prayer of exile, and they claim his body. Exhausted, he cannot win.
A light falls between them. A woman with flowing red hair, a magic bow on her back and a red sword that sings like birds when it moves, fights at his side until the demons flee. She is Artemis, daughter of Zeus, goddess of the hunt. She cannot understand what he is: a human, but carrying a dark power that demons can touch directly. Cristian tells her only that a demon tricked him and took his human form. Moved, she promises to help him whatever happens.
Meanwhile, Dionysus reveals the truth to Duke Giovanni. Humiliated by his own daughter, Giovanni strikes her so hard that her lips bleed. Elizabeth cries all night in her room, believing Cristian is dead.
Chapter 9
Chapter 9
Queen Anne's Revenge
Back in Tuscany, Azazel heals him and hands him a black envelope with a treasure map. The second name is the pirate Blackbeard. In Newfoundland, Cristian finds the province of Serrino in flames and helps the villagers fight the fire, his face hidden under his father's old robes. There he meets Roberto Salazar, a young French squire.
The Queen Anne's Revenge, the greatest warship ever built, opens fire on the coast with four hundred cannons while the pirates storm the shore. Cristian leaves Roberto to protect the survivors, takes his ship and gives chase all the way to the frozen seas west of Greenland. There Blackbeard's hands glow violet, the same dark power as Nobunaga's, and his ship transforms.
On the ice, Blackbeard shoots Cristian in the shoulder, then enchants his silver gun with darkness when the cursed armor stops his bullets. Badly wounded, Cristian lets his arms become Expher's tentacles, drives them under the ice and runs the pirate through from below. Blackbeard's soul gives him the power to turn what he touches into something greater and cursed, starting with the pirate's own guns and sword. He brings the kidnapped villagers home and gives Blackbeard's ship to Roberto. With every soul he takes, the pure half of his own grows darker.
Chapter 10
Chapter 10
A Toast in London
At the royal castle of London, with the blessing of King Henry VIII, Duke Giovanni celebrates the engagement of Elizabeth to the god Dionysus. The noble families of Europe and the lawmakers of Siena raise their glasses as Dionysus promises them a new Europe, modern and powerful.
During the feast Elizabeth slips away to the garden, where her cousin Ruth finds her tearing petals from a flower and gives her what comfort she can. Later, alone in the corridors, Elizabeth hears voices behind a door: her father and Dionysus, drinking to their success.
Giovanni's plan is simple. With his daughter married to a god, the people will beg for Elizabeth on the throne. Queen Leonore will die, and Ruth will be declared illegitimate. Dionysus sees the first step toward ruling over men, then over the world. Elizabeth runs and locks herself in her room. From that night on, she knows her aunt's life is in her hands.
Chapter 11
Chapter 11
The Sands of Siwa
Azazel's third envelope is blue: a letter in ancient Egyptian, a necklace of rubies and emeralds, and an old key. On the road to the port, Cristian is followed by Marcus Brasco, Henry's son, now a young squire, who recognizes the D' San Fernald crest on his robe but not the man inside it. Cristian sends him home.
In Egypt he helps a young woman with her luggage. She is Karima Sunuhe, daughter of Emperor Kahem of Sanabú. For the first time, Cristian tells someone his whole story, and Karima feels only compassion. She takes him to her father's palace, then across the desert through a storm that floods the sands, to the oasis of Siwa and the eldest man in Egypt, the Hacmoni Ghazi.
Ghazi reads the letter. It carries the seal of Pharaoh Thutmose III, and with it, the pharaoh's final testimony: thousands of years ago he hid his soul from death inside his own tomb. On the road south, Ghazi tells Cristian the legend of the War between Light and Darkness, which Cristian always took for a children's story. That night, while the caravan celebrates, a woman of the shadows attacks him and escapes.
Chapter 12
Chapter 12
The Tomb of Thutmose III
At the tomb, the woman of the shadows returns, and this time Cristian defeats her. He goes down alone on a rope into the dark. The crypt is protected by a foreign magic that cancels his dark powers: inside, he is only a man, without Expher and without his armor.
The pharaoh's soul rises into a stone statue of himself. When Cristian shatters it, a green mist pours from its stone heart and possesses a statue of Anubis, the god who protected him, master of mirages and the power of the mind. Cristian survives the god's telekinesis, recovers the talisman, overpowers him and pins the pharaoh's soul against his solid gold sarcophagus before taking it.
Thutmose's soul brings him telekinesis: he can move things with his mind and strike from a distance. He gives the pharaoh's golden spear to Ghazi and Azazel's relic to Karima, and at the port he promises her he will come back. Far away, in Dionysus's mansion, Elizabeth goes out every night to look at their star, which shines a little less each time.
Chapter 13
Chapter 13
The Bridge of Brașov
Home in Tuscany, Cristian opens his father's safe, finds the photographs of his parents, and drinks his father's favorite rum until he falls to his knees. Azazel appears from the darkness, pleased. One name remains, and it is the hardest: a king who cheated death while still alive.
Cristian rides a black horse to Romania, to the lost city near Brașov. The only way in is an old wooden bridge over a poisonous swamp full of demons. Someone has been following him: Artemis, hunting the same nomad legion. She lets him pass in exchange for his help. He runs across the bridge while she covers him from his horse with her bow.
At the end of the swamp, the shadows open and Astaroth appears, a demon of the Battalion rank, stronger than them both. When they finally bring him down, he rises again with an art of light, Sanitatem, and heals every wound. Artemis answers with Geminus and splits into two, and together the three blades destroy the Battalion in an explosion of colors like a rainbow. Before they part, Artemis thanks him, still not knowing what he is.
Chapter 14
Chapter 14
The Cathedral of Faremur
The lost city is empty, yet someone keeps it clean. In the morning Cristian meets two orphan twins, Sebastián and Camelia Viteli, who pelt him with stones before they become friends. Their family, with the rest of the town, was taken six years ago by Vlad Draculea, who lives in the Cathedral of Faremur at the top of the mountain.
The three climb past black birds with red eyes to the cathedral doors. Inside they split up. Camelia, hidden behind a curtain from Vlad's half-human soldiers, steals the keys to every door. Sebastián goes down into the tunnels with Cristian's enchanted shotgun and finds the prison where the townsfolk are held. Cristian enters a hall of mirrors, where the people of his past and present appear one by one and say everything he fears, until at last a mirror shows him human again, as he was before he died. Behind him, Vlad whispers. Vlad has no reflection.
The duel on the cathedral's terrace is the hardest of his life. Vlad's staff becomes a scythe, a storm brings a rain of glass, and only when Cristian raises a barrier of stillness, like the one in the pharaoh's tomb, does the fight become fist against fist. Vlad falls. Taking his soul, Cristian sees the secret of his life: Death in human form once gave Vlad a contract for cheating it, a prayer that lets whoever is dying go back to the moment before. Then wings of white feathers open on Cristian's back, the Wings of Odenea. He breaks into the prison, frees the town and flies out through the roof as the cathedral collapses.
Chapter 15
Chapter 15
The Dionysian Palace
With four souls taken, Azazel keeps his word. Cristian's soul is rebuilt and his human form returns, though his body will never be quite the same. He rides to the palace of Dionysus to bring Elizabeth home.
The battle against the god is fierce, and this time Cristian wins. But Dionysus refuses to let them be together. With the last of his strength he drives his golden sword through Elizabeth's back and into her heart. Cristian's rage finishes what the battle began, and Dionysus's Prism is torn from him.
Azazel appears before the palace, and Cristian begs him to save her, as he once saved him. Azazel knows that without Elizabeth, Cristian has no reason to live, and he still needs him. But she is already gone. Instead, Azazel holds her soul before it can leave and divides it: one part he gives to Cristian, and one he sends to Heaven. A soul that returns incomplete through an art of light, he explains, rebuilds itself over at least two hundred years and returns to life in another body, as another person, with no memory of who it was. What Azazel does not tell him is that he divided it in three, and kept the last piece for himself.
Epilogue
Epilogue
Elizabeth's Letter
Searching the palace for anything of hers, Cristian finds, hidden between the old walls, a letter Elizabeth wrote shortly before she died. He reads it, leaves, and from that day no one knows where he is.
The next morning a guard at the castle of Siena receives an anonymous letter bearing the royal seal. In it, Elizabeth tells Queen Leonore everything: the pact between her father and Dionysus, the plan to murder the queen and dethrone Ruth, and her life as a prisoner in the palace. "It is possible that when Your Majesty reads this letter I will already be dead," she writes. She asks only for justice, and for the good of Siena.
Duke Giovanni Gloucester is arrested, judged for treason before the high court and the people of Siena, and executed. The queen's soldiers find the palace of Dionysus abandoned, and Elizabeth is buried beside her mother in the garden of the royal castle of Siena, where she rests in peace.
Book 2The Army of Light
Centuries later, the seat of Dionysus in the Celestial Union stands empty, and the gods have learned how he died. Judging Cristian a threat to the balance of the three worlds, the Union calls upon its strongest warriors, the Army of Light.
Elizabeth’s soul has returned to the world in a new body and a new life, with no memory of who she was. To reach her, Cristian will search for the four forbidden arts, hidden in places no man was meant to find and guarded by beasts no man was meant to face, while an old friend among the gods must choose between him and her own kind.
The chapters of this book are on their way.
Book 3Ricardo Monteoro
Dublin, the tenth century. Ricardo Monteoro, an orphan raised among thieves, becomes the most wanted man in Ireland. When he breaks into the palace of a demon living in human form, he is not punished. He is hired.
His task: steal the Scroll of Resurrection from the castle of Zeus. The gold that follows makes him a king. The feather left behind makes him prey. The story of a soul that refused to stay dead.
The chapters of this book are on their way.
Book 4After Dawn
Every war between light and darkness has ended the same way: with one side forced into the shadows. But the shadows remember, and they have been waiting.
When the dawn finally seems to come, an old alliance shows its true face, the gates between the worlds are tested, and Cristian must carry a power that was never meant for human hands.
