by Bree Despain
Part of The Dark Divine
First published 2011
Brother Gabriel is a young monk writing letters home to his sister during the Crusades. He is searching for the truth about the Urbat, a curse older than anyone will explain to him. The letters he sends describe that search in careful detail, one discovery at a time. Then the letters stop. What the original bound collection never showed was what came next: the moment Gabriel stopped being a seeker and became something else entirely. These recovered letters pick up where the others left off. They follow Gabriel through his fall to the Urbat curse and into the years after, when his focus narrows to one goal: finding the man responsible and making him pay. The monk who once wrote to his sister with curiosity and devotion is gone. What replaces him is harder, colder, and driven by a need for revenge that does not leave room for much else. These letters explain how Gabriel became the ancient, complicated figure that Daniel and Grace encounter centuries later in the Dark Divine trilogy.
Genres: fantasy, paranormal-fiction, young-adult, dark-fantasy, historical-fantasy
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, haunting, introspective, melancholic
Tropes: corruption-arc, epistolary-narrative, fall-from-grace, prequel
Setting: Crusades
Period: Medieval period, Centuries later
18 pages · Kindle Edition · Egmont USA
Content warnings: death, violence