Author Description

What if history was not a river, but a wound? For Dr. Aris Thorne, it is a festering sickness he is desperate to cure. A brilliant historian haunted by the ghosts of "what-if," Aris is obsessed with the great tragedies of the 20th century. To him, the World Wars, the political assassinations, the fall of empires-they are not just events to be studied, but catastrophic design flaws in the very fabric of reality. His quiet life of academia is a constant, private torment, a battle between his faith in a divine plan and the overwhelming evidence of a chaotic, broken world. Everything changes when a mysterious courier delivers an ancient, impossible book. Bound in what looks like human skin and written in a perversion of known languages, the blasphemous tome known as Al-Nassaj-The Weaver-offers Aris the ultimate temptation: the power to reach back in time and un-pick the threads of history. It offers him the chance to correct the mistakes, to heal the wounds, to build a better world. Driven by a grief he cannot cure and a hope he cannot contain, Aris performs a forbidden ritual to prevent the single shot that ignited World War I. He succeeds. He saves millions. He creates a world of perfect peace and harmony. But the peace is a lie. The harmony is a cage. His new reality is a sterile, silent world watched over by serene, three-eyed beings, a humanity "perfected" into soulless puppets of a vast, unfeeling consciousness. In healing the old wound, Aris has infected reality with a far more terrifying disease. He has broken a cosmic truce between ancient, primordial gods-the Weaver of Order and the howling maw of Chaos. Now, Aris is a fugitive in the paradise he created, the last man who remembers the beautiful, violent, and flawed world that was. The very book that gave him his power holds the key to a conflict that threatens to un-weave reality itself. To save humanity, he must become a soldier in a war fought not with guns, but