Kat Hankinson

Forge of Angels, Book One: 

To Slay Ourobouros

 

Story Statement

In a world ruled by Dagons — descendants of a fallen angel who control humankind with Shadow Magic and a vast theocracy — gifted translator Leah Duvall learns that her Dagon “fathers” killed her mother in order to control her. She joins a rebel group to help them unlock the ancient power that can destroy the Dagons. But the knowledge she finds reveals a terrifying secret about her own origins. With the power awakening in her, can she avenge her mother and free humankind, or will her very existence empower the Dagons to enslaved humanity forever?

 

Antagonist

Renault Atreus is a centuries-old “superior” being called a Dagon: a descendant of a fallen angel who once ruled the earth as a God King. Born in the 17^th century, he has seen religious wars tear Europe apart. He has seen the fall of the aristocracies, and the rise of democracy — as well as its descent into nationalism and fascism. He has seen his fellow Dagons create a new world order only to fight more wars against resistant nations — and each other. His solution: to resurrect the Dagons’ ancient ancestor: an all-powerful living god who will bring about unity and peace.

 

Title

To Slay Ourobouros

 

Comparables.

A story of lost memory and powerful self-discovery like Captain Marvel, in a world comparable to Sarah J. Maas’ Crescent City.

 

Conflict

When she learns that her Dagon masters killer her mother in order to raise and train her for their own purposes, Leah Duvall joins the rebel Dagons to decipher the inscriptions on a mysterious artifact, unlocking an ancient power that will destroy the Dagons. But her benefactor, the rebel Dagon Atreus, plans to use these secrets to resurrect a tyrannical God King: an immortal being that will enslave humanity and make life on earth a living Hell.

 

Core Wound

The Dagons who raised her lied to her about her past, telling her her mother abandoned her for a suicide mission, but Leah learns this is a lie: the Dagons themselves killed her in order to raise her themselves, so they could use her gift for their own purposes. Now she wants revenge.

Betrayed by the Dagons — her “fathers,” superior men descended from an angel who have ruled the world for a over century — gifted translator Leah Duvall joins a group of rebels and exiles in order to unlock an ancient power that will destroy the Dagons. But the power changes her. Can she destroy the Dagons, or is she doomed to become one of them, trapped in their dark realm as they enslave all of humanity?

 

Secondary conflict

Leah’s relationship with Atreus, in which she begins to trust him as a mentor, fuels her internal conflict when she realizes he is using her power to resurrect a God King.

Leah’s relationship with Jake tests — and boosts— her faith in the ability of people to fight the dark influence taking over the world.

 

Setting

The story unfolds at a research institute in Anatolia, in the shadow of the volcanic Mount Ararat, and the ruins of ancient cities. We will also see the splendor of those cities and lands as they once were when legendary figures lived, loved, and battled.

 

The story begins in New York City, which has been transformed by the Dagons. Surrounding what was once Central Park is a vast citadel, a Vatican-like complex called the Patropolis, where the Dagons live — and where those with traces of Dagon DNA are privileged to dwell. Outside the Patropolis ordinary people live in the ruins of what was once a great city… now a network of improvised dwellings and secret mazes and underground canals where the Resistance operates.

 

The symbols on the page danced in rows like broken snowflakes drawn in black ink, or tumbled musical notes. As Ellie Whitaker looked, they seemed to tremble as if trying to turn and reveal more. She found herself holding her breath in anticipation. It was happening again. Ellie shook her head clear and sat back.

She would seem to be doing something perfectly ordinary: sitting at her desk in the Antiquities Archive at Manhattan University, with a cup of coffee from the bodega steaming to the right of her putty-colored keyboard with faded letters on its keys. And it seemed like an ordinary afternoon. The sounds of sirens wailed in the distance, muffled by the walls of the old brownstone where the Archive was housed. It was like home to Ellie. The quiet buzzing of dimmed LED lights and the slightly dusty smell of the collection created the feeling that she was in a place of secrets and mystery. And the only person she had to deal with on a daily basis was her boss and mentor, Professor Garrett Dockery, who was working quietly behind his office door, across the room from her cubicle.

But it was not an ordinary afternoon at all. Ellie’s mind sparked with excitement and a touch of fear as she gazed again at the page of symbols. The completed shapes swam and turned in her mind’s eye, and as she floated among them, lightly touching them, they formed living words, and it was as if she herself were in some stony place, a stone building with snow falling outside the open door, speaking these words:

…and the sons of the God King were called The Great Ones – The Dagons – and each bore a dark-stoned ring made for hunting on the paths of shadow…

Again she pulled herself out of the vision. Ellie’s very blood seemed to tingle. Even the burn scar on the back of her neck and along her right arm stung strangely. She was accustomed to visualizing when she translated, and she was used to the thrill of discovery. But this was like nothing she had done – or felt – before.

This was the second such page she had translated in this way. But why did the symbols seem to come alive as she gazed at them? Where had they come from? Her boss had only given her this single sheet of paper with these symbols on it without any explanation.

Ellie recalled having seen something like this before -- in an old article, she thought. She turned her attention to the monitor on her desk – a bulky thing that was practically an antique itself – and typed in a search for articles with terms describing the symbols – snowflake, mandala, puzzle piece – until she found what she was looking for: images of the very same symbols, copied from an ancient book called the Altai Manuscript.

There were a few articles, a handful, dated from the late the 1800s through the 1920s. She sorted them in chronological order:

Puzzling Manuscript Found in Ruins of Buddhist Monastery Near Altai Mountains

The Impenetrable Altai Manuscript: Theories and Questions

After a Decade of Study, the Altai Manuscript Continues to Confound Scholars

Altai Manuscript Declared a Hoax

Ellie remembered hearing about this. The discovery of this book had been a sensation, but after years of effort, the greatest minds in linguistics had not been able to understand the Altai Manuscript, so they decided it must be gibberish, a fake created by a fame-hungry explorer.

Except that it wasn’t. Ellie had just translated part of it. She zoomed in on the images on her screen. As she studied them, her mouth went dry and her heart quickened. From what she could see, there was no question: many of the symbols were the very same.

Across the room, the door to her boss' office was ajar. Ellie heard Garrett gathering up his keys as he prepared to leave for the day.

“Garrett!” she called. It took some effort to keep her voice from quavering, “Do you have a minute?”

Garrett emerged from his office. “Always,” he said. He slid the shoulder strap of his leather briefcase off his lanky frame, dropping the bag on the chair beside his office door.

Ellie sat back as Garrett leaned over her shoulder to see the computer screen. As he looked at the screen, he brushed back the lock of straight sandy brown hair that fell across his forehead. “I remember hearing about this,” he laughed. “So you’ve gone down an antiquities rabbit hole!”

Ellie quietly lifted the paper from her desk and handed it to him. Garrett glanced at her briefly with a puzzled expression, lifted the page, scanned it carefully, then gazed again at the screen. His light brows drew together and his mobile mouth opened slightly in surprise. He pulled up a chair next to Ellie’s desk and placed the paper back down.

“I had no idea,” he said. “I thought these symbols were just a kind of puzzle…” His blue eyes pinned her gaze. “Do you know what you’ve done? Do you know what this means?”

It was too much to even think about the implications, so Ellie simply said, “Literally -- it means the God-king had five sons…” Garret steepled his fingers under his chin and watched her.  “… and they all had these dark stone rings for hunting on paths of shadow...”

Garrett’s smile vanished and he seemed to go pale for a moment. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

“They each had a ring.” Ellie pointed to the corresponding characters on the page. “There were five sons of this God-king. And they each had one of these rings.”

Garrett looked down, tapping his paired index fingers against his forehead a few times. Beyond the walls of the building, a siren wailed and faded away.

Garrett finally lifted his head and said, “But of course you know I wasn’t asking about the translation, Ellie. You know what I meant: do you understand the importance of what you’ve done?”

Ellie knew. But how was she supposed to talk about it? Certainly she worked for a top research university – but she was just an entry level librarian/administrative assistant who’d gotten her BA one class at a time. Translating was a personal passion, not a career.

“You’ve cracked a code no linguist in generations has been able to understand.” Garrett kept trying to meet her eyes, but she kept them focused on her own hands, one covering the other on her desk.

“I understand that,” she said. But things like this weren’t supposed to happen to her.

Forge of Angels

By Kat Blackwood

 

Prologue

 

Shikari woke gasping, choking on smoke, surrounded by half-burned scrolls and books, broken goddess statues -- and the bloodied bodies of mail-clad soldiers and yellow-robed monks. Flames licked blackened beams and fallen timbers.

Agony shot through Shikari’s body with each breath. He put a hand to his chest, and it came away red – a gaping wound revealed a splintered rib and pulsing blood that spilled down his torso like a dark red waterfall. If only he could die here and now and be done with it. But as he watched, the bone knit back together, the bleeding ceased, and the flesh healed until there was only a bloodied gash in his leather armor.

With smoke burning his eyes and lungs, Shikari went to each body, turning them carefully as he checked for signs of life. There were none. “Oh, no, no…” he said softly. He stumbled through a narrow passage to an open colonnade, and leaned on one of the pillars.

A Voice resounded in his mind. “You did this…”

He knew this Voice. He did not like this Voice. “No, I never…”

“You failed to kill Azan when you could have. Now his descendants rule by fire and sword. And you led them here, you fool.”

 “I only wanted—”

“What you want doesn’t matter.”

“—I wanted to —”

“You have to kill them all. Even if it takes a thousand years…”

“I just wanted to remember who I was before you made me a killer!”

“Do you really?” said the Voice.  “Very well…”

The jumble of memories in Shikari’s mind – the long treks to kill tyrants and warlords, to hunt down their offspring – to stop these beings called Dagons -- suddenly cleared. In their place was the figure of a woman in bright armor, her sword flashing in the sun, her cloak and black hair streaming in the wind, her face lit with the fierce joy of battle. She called out: Ur-Avir!

“NO!”

“Had enough?”

“Stop it. Please.”

“Do you want to forget?”

“Yes. Yes. Please.”

The vision faded like smoke on the wind. Hearing shouts in the distance, Shikari gazed down the hill. On the grassy slopes below, men on horseback were turning their mounts and coming this way: he’d been seen.

Wearily he made his way back to the library chamber and cast about for his sword. He found it lodged in the chest of a dead soldier, and yanked it free. He hefted the blade with practiced ease as he waded through the ruined scrolls and scattered pages littering the stone floor. Better use the hallway, he thought. One man can always take on many in a narrow place. He rested a few moments more, wiping the blood from his blade and hands on his breeches, until he heard the clatter of hooves on the paved path leading up to the monastery. He stood in his accustomed fighting stance.  Well, boys, he thought to the soldiers heading his way, today you are dying. Let’s get it over with.

 

Chapter One

“Edgar!” Sheila Whitaker said to the cactus plant on her desk, “I think I’ve seen this before!”

It was early evening, and the Antiquities Archive of Manhattan University was even more quiet than usual. The hum of fluorescent lights, the lack of windows in this back section, and the way the old building muffled the sounds of traffic and sirens outside always made the archive feel timeless. While others her age were out at clubs and bars, Sheila had spent many a long evening here, translating over Chinese takeout with her boss, Garrett Dockery.

She was studying a photocopied document Garrett had given her to translate. The script looked like cuneiform with its stylized, wedge-like marks, but it wasn’t in any known language from the Bronze Age – the period when such writing was used. This was the second sample her boss had given her. It had taken Sheila a few weeks to crack the first sample, and she’d been so engrossed in the translation process that she hadn’t thought much about the source.

But now she recalled why it had seemed familiar to her. 

Sheila typed “Altai Manuscript” into the search bar on her PC. The search pulled up images of a document discovered a century ago in the ruins of a Central Asian monastery. Sheila had read about it years ago. The Altai Manuscript had puzzled scholars for several years: the book itself was clearly of medieval origin, but the cuneiform script written in its pages was far, far older.  How could a medieval monk possibly be familiar with such an ancient form of writing – a form predating Latin and Greek by a thousand years at least? When the best linguists of the early 20^th century had failed to translate it, the Altai Manuscript had been declared a hoax and promptly relegated to the trash bin of linguistic history, a mere curiosity.

Sheila compared the patterns of symbols in the document her boss had given her to an image of the Altai Manuscript. They matched up perfectly.

“Edgar,” Sheila gasped. “This is impossible! Everyone thought this was a hoax. But…”

But Sheila Whitaker, an unimportant archive employee at Manhattan University, in her little cubicle amidst the clutter of dusty antiquities, had translated it.

Edgar, of course, didn’t have anything to say. 

“Garrett,” she called toward the open door across the room. “Did you know about this?”

 

 

 

 

1.       A shy librarian with an uncanny talent for languages must stop an ancient conspiracy of Dagons -- “superior” men using dark magic to corrupt and dominate humankind.

2.       The Dagons are descended from an ancient god-king named Azan. Azan was a good but quick-tempered, impatient king. When his kingdom was under attack and he had no other way to save his people, Azan used a forbidden stone to gain godlike powers. He used these powers to save his people, but a spirit trapped in the stone gradually corrupted his mind and he became an evil tyrant. The corrupting spirit was none other than the fallen angel Yitzhal, whose fall was the very cause of all suffering on earth. Through Azan, this fallen angel fathered five sons known as the Dagons. When Azan was killed by an angelic assassin, the five Dagons fled to the far corners of the earth, where they established great empires, fathering tyrants and bloodthirsty warlords. But Dagons were almost always born male, so with each generation of breeding with mortal women, their powers grew weaker. This weakness combined with their tendency to fight one another allowed humankind to rebel during the democratic revolutions in modern history. As our story opens, the Dagons are poised to join forces, regain their ancient power, and dominate humankind once again.

3.       The working title for this novel is Forge of Angels.

4.       My comps need work, but for now I can say it’s rather like The Lord of the Rings meets The DaVinci Code. It’s high fantasy that crosses over into “real world” history and plays out in a Gotham-style New York City as well a mythological ancient Middle East and central Asia. I am currently exploring more comparable works.

5.       When an ancient conspiracy of “Superior” men called Dagons spark mass violence on a global scale, an insecure librarian must find the power stop them before they can use her child to complete their plan. 

6.       The librarian protagonist, Sheila Whitaker, had a mother who was mentally unstable. Sheila’s childhood was a nightmare. But when she learns that she is descended from an angel sent to destroy the ancient god-king millennia ago, Sheila realizes that her mother’s insanity was due to her not understanding the angelic nature, a nature she had inherited from her oppressed female ancestors and passed on to Sheila.
In society at large, the wounds of historical, collective trauma are playing themselves out. This conflict is personified in Sheila’s lover Jake Santiago, who is descended from Dagon conquistadors and indigenous people. Jake struggles to stop the ancestors who created such vast traumas from taking over his will. To defeat the Dagons -- and save their child -- Sheila and Jake will have to find the key to ending the repetition of these collective traumas.

7.       Setting: the immediate setting is a Gotham-like, postapocalyptic New York City. There is also a sprawling Dagon mansion set on an island off the New England coast. In the ancient mythological part of the story, there is a rich Middle Eastern kingdom, wild central Asian steppelands and sacred mountains with a magical valley from which one can glimpse the first of the Nine Heavens, where the Blacksmith god forges angels, stars and worlds. Finally, the stone in which the fallen angel was trapped, called Shadowstone, contains a shadowy MC Escher-like labyrinth which the Dagons use to trap victims, and defy the laws of physics by traveling as shadows through shadows. The Dagons use shadowstone rings to enter and navigate this Shadow realm. They plan to unite and use the combined power of their rings to manifest the Shadowstone Realm across the entire world, turning our planet into a dark and terrifying maze ruled by the fallen angel.