A dying monk. An iron key. A conspiracy older than Christendom.

1347. Scribe Thomas of Eltville thought his greatest challenge would be copying manuscripts in peace. Then his mentor is murdered in front of him -- and thrusts an iron key into his hands with his dying breath.

The key unlocks a cipher hidden in manuscript margins across Europe. The cipher reveals a conspiracy that has been engineering human bloodlines -- and human catastrophes -- for over two thousand years.

Now Thomas is running for his life with two unlikely allies: Margarethe, a cloth merchant whose father was tortured to death by the Order for knowing too much, and Maria, a fourteen-year-old girl who carries forty generations of forbidden knowledge encoded in her blood.

Together, they must race across plague-ravaged Europe to find seven keys before the Order recaptures them. Each key reveals another layer of a conspiracy so vast it makes the Black Death look like a side project.

Because the Order doesn't just preserve knowledge through dark ages -- they create the dark ages.

Collapse isn't inevitable. It's engineered. And Thomas has just become the one person who can prove it.

The Aethelred Cipher is Book 1 of The Architecture of Survival -- a 12-book saga spanning 3,200 years from Bronze Age Egypt to the modern era. Each book stands alone. Together, they tell the story of two competing networks locked in an existential war over humanity's future.

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• Print Length: 261 Pages
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