Plague Diaries

Book : The Keeper of Tales Trilogy

by Ronlyn Domingue

Genres: Fantasy; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; General Fiction

Synopsis

The astounding, epic conclusion to the Keeper of Tales Trilogy brings together the cryptic prophecy in The Mapmaker’s War and the troubling mysteries in The Chronicle of Secret Riven —leading to an unforgettable reckoning between lies and truth. We are all born made of gold. Secret Riven—the mystically gifted heroine who now represses her uncanny telepathic power—works for the mysterious magnate Fewmany as an archivist in his private library. There, she stumbles upon the arcane manuscript that had vanished following her mother’s untimely death. She suspects the manuscript contains a profound secret, and she is yet unaware of its link to a thousand-year-old war and her own family’s legacy. The tasks before her are clear: Secret must finally learn what Fewmany wants from her as well as the meaning of a strange symbol she’s dreamed of since childhood. At last, she must confront the questions haunting her and depart on a quest to find the truth about herself, her dead mother, and her fate—to unleash a Plague of Silences meant to destroy, and transform, the world as all have known it. A dazzling, genre-bending masterwork, The Plague Diaries illuminates the power of our choices, the scars they leave, and the wounds they heal.

Release date: August 29, 2017

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 432

Sample

The Plague Diaries

Prologue

FATE IS A LINE FREE will twists into a spiral. A path fractured into forks that lead to the same place. A snake that bites its own tail. The beginning knows its end.

This is the paradox: Free will slips among the twists of fate. Crosses the valley, scales the mountain, enters the cave. Finds a new way through fixed space. The end remembers where it began.

When I was a child, I knew—believed—none of this.

On a summer morning, weeks before I turned eighteen, a pigeon, a dove, and a sparrow summoned me to visit an estranged friend. I went to her cottage in the woods west of town. There, Old Woman revealed the symbol carved in stone at her hearth. She knew I’d once dreamed of this symbol but had long concealed its presence in her home from me. Then, she said it was known “the man Fewmany” was buying land where other stones lay, but not the reason why. She spoke of the missing arcane manuscript entrusted to my late mother, who was meant to decipher the text but didn’t. Old Woman told me, “You are here to shift a balance, one with the potential to deepen our darkness or bear forth a hidden light.”

Both were my fate, the darkness and the light, and the one I chose, a matter of free will.

I thought I had a choice to accept neither. I wanted no part of a prophecy, although my blood and bones knew it to be true. Foolish, because I’d read enough myth, lore, and fairy tales to know when one receives a call—hold a candle to a sleeping monster lover, search the world for a lost daughter, take a basket to Grandmother’s house, spin straw into gold—one must heed it. That is fate. How one responds, that is free will.

So, descendants and survivors, here told is what happened to me, once as innocent as the girls in the tales I loved, and how it came to pass that I released the Plague of Silences.