The Abbey's Last Confession
A Reverse Chronology of Postwar Magic

About this book:

In the ashes of 1947, the last monks of the Order of the Hidden Meridian burn their registry and wait for the French to arrive. Magic isn't what it used to be—the ley lines are poisoned, the wards are cold, and the great Shield that held the war at bay has shattered. Father Thomas tends a dying American lieutenant cursed by a Nazi booby-trap, while something ancient and predatory stirs in the abandoned quarry to the north. The order's final confession will either ground the surge or bury them all.

But the story doesn't begin here. It unspools backward, year by year, through the unsigned treaties of '46, the midnight accords of '45, the siege of the monastery, the alchemists of Munich, the ritual in the Black Forest—all the way to the first betrayal in '41. Each chapter peels back another layer of what the monks survived, what they sold, and what they buried in the crypt beneath the abbey: a ledger of seventy-two names, a key to a vault that shouldn't exist, and the terrible truth about the *Chronos Protocol* that both sides of the war would have killed to control.

Atmospheric, intricate, and haunting, *The Abbey's Last Confession* reimagines the aftermath of World War II as a secret history of collapsing miracles and compromised saints. For readers who love the scholarly magic of *Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*, the reverse architecture of *The Night Watch*, and the moral weight of *A Canticle for Leibowitz*—this is postwar Europe as you've never seen it, where the miracles are rusting, the saints are tired, and the only way forward is to tell the truth, one confession at a time.