A Trilogy of Roma and the East

Book 1:  My Son from Afar
Book 2:  The Sound of Seven Thunders
Book 3:  A Thousand May Fall

Follow epic souls in the struggle
for courage, for endurance,
for love and loyalty…

THE TIME:  nineteen centuries ago…

THE PLACE:  harsh borderlands (in today’s Syria & Iraq),
hotly contested by that age’s two greatest powers—
the Roman Empire and the Parthian Empire—
at the apex of their might and mutual hatred.

Astonishingly, the fates of both these empires become
intricately bound up in the lives of three people caught
in a complex interplay of inescapable closeness,
yet also unbridgeable separation:

⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅ a fiercely brilliant, free-spirited young Parthian noblewoman,
forced into captivity by Romans (after the battle-death
of her husband, Parthia’s greatest military hero)—
and who has sworn to escape and return to her homeland;

⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅ her captor, the age’s most illustrious Roman general,
a man of extraordinary insight whose deepest passion
is for ever-expanding Roman rule and order worldwide—
for which he is bitterly opposed by a conniving new emperor,
a cautious and luxury-loving usurper;

⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅ and the Parthian woman’s only child,
a youth of beautiful bearing and prodigious skill—
born into military slavery, yet growing up captivated
by the pride and glory of Roma’s legions, while he’s kept
forcibly ignorant of his background and his own prophesied
future greatness in Parthia—much to his mother’s grief.

Tragic and traumatic circumstances will thrust this son
—as a young man—into a raging civil conflict in Parthia
where all sides stake a life-or-death claim on his future.
Meanwhile he follows a costly sacrificial path in pursuing
the woman he loves, keeping a brother-friend who cannot share
his love for the military, and accepting another brother-friend
who’s tempted to betray him into enemy hands.

HERE ARE human hearts striving
for freedom, for father-love,
for fulfillment of powerful dreams,
and for deeper wisdom to endure
this world’s angry realities
and pressing brokenness.

 

 

“Take new courage, allow no fear;
one day we may find it pleasant to look back
and remember this affliction.
Through untold dangers, countless twists,
our path still leads onward.”

—Virgil, Aeneid, I