Vestige

In this secret society tale that's "thought-provoking throughout" (Kirkus Reviews), a group of millennials inherits the ancient technology that creates new religions, and must decide when—and how—to change the world, under the threat of an apocalyptic prophecy.

“Crisis, this next great Earth was gifted to them. An entire generation, silenced by situation, incubated.”

Istanbul, yesterday: in a room above a shop selling swords made of stone, trinkets made of glass, and sacred souvenirs, the last of the trained saints decided to die. The only word on their suicide note? Muleykha.

They were the Auromzed of the Ohm ce Alefa—the ancient, secret council that designed every religion known to humankind. Equipped with the technology that their ancestors dispersed in all corners of the globe, this circle has manufactured miracles, induced prophets, and guided morality through the rise and fall of every civilization on Earth. A new council ascends every 360 years, and muleykha is their most-heeded prophecy: that three women seated at their table of six will trigger the end of the world.

Now, the heirs—an architect, a warrior, an archivist, an inventor, a businessman, and a budding physician—must make sense of their parents’ decision and pick up, untrained, where their elders left off. As they attend to their grief while devising a plan to address every crisis of the modern age, how much will what they do and don’t know undermine them?

For fans of the themes in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the inventions in Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, and the scope of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, Vestige: Book One merges elements of universal heritage with avant-garde world-building to deliver a cathartic—and at times humorous—speculative fiction commentary on how we survive our times.