The hour of mysteries has struck. Along with it, the grand clock of time, which for centuries has relentlessly moved forward, crushing lives and futures with its long needle. That needle has turned a lot, bringing us to the end of the 19th century. Yes, the time for secrets has arrived.
It arrived in the form of an envelope, a red envelope sealed with the pompous crest of a countess, yet delivered by a shabby postman to an equally shabby apartment where two self-proclaimed detectives reside. One, Lucy Moon, resonates with all the imagination the world has bestowed upon her, her eyes seeing nothing but mysteries to solve and truths to unearth from the depths where they have been buried. The other, Alistair de Saule, has eyes the color of a coal sky, gray, gray, gray, like the steel from which his heart seems to be made. His gaze is fixed on the past and the grand clock that has never stopped turning. Fixed on a past that has flown away, like a leaf in the wind.
With this envelope, a great adventure is set to begin, taking them from dark and twisted corridors, under the sounds of the gears of an obscure machinery and broken hearts, to the streets of London and beyond. Far, very far into the clouds and the muck of this world. And as an inextricable web of puzzles weaves around them, leading them into a strange conspiracy, an eerie melody will commence. One of fallen angels, destroyed worlds, and monster hunters. But how far, how far will they go? To the end of time, to the brink of life.
Until all the mysteries, finally, are solved.
** A young woman sees a walking dead in the open streets of Whitby. A train full of corpses crashes into Kings Cross. In an Asylum, a gruesome nightmare becomes horrible reality.
All this should have been a warning to Kyle and his partner Benjamin of the Order of Seekers. **
"Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.
The world wants to be deceived; let it be deceived!"
- Motto of the Order of Seekers -
London 1899.
Where spirit calling has become as normal as cricket and tennis, the lines between fantasy and reality blur. In fine society, occultism and an affiliation with 'secret' lodges are part of the latest fashion. A particularly exclusive group of this kind is the Order of Seekers, dedicated to researching, keeping secrets, and covering up supernatural events.
The Magician Kyle Crowford and the Military Doctor Dr. Benjamin Archer belong to that lodge. Their latest order: a girl is said to have seen a revenant in Whitby in broad daylight. Was it just the mirage of a twisted mind or horrible facts? A race against time begins for the seekers because their tracks always lead them to a clue: vampires. If everything turns out to be true and the dead walk the earth, the living will fill the graves by the hundreds.
What begins for the two men with a seemingly harmless order develops into a landslide of events, the extent of which soon terrorizes the whole of London.
****
Cover by Thinkerling