Crimson Advent

On the first day of November, the south door of Saint Varro's Cathedral was found open. A wolf was inside. It was sitting in the centre of the nave, facing the altar. It did not attack. It did not flee. It waited - with the patient certainty of a thing that has arrived somewhere it intended to arrive - for the cathedral to understand this. Brother Aldric, the cathedral's senior monk, did the only thing available to him. He found a collar and a chain. The chain held. What broke it was not the wolf. ― CRIMSON ADVENT is the first volume of LUPUS POTESTATIS - a gothic dark fiction series following one cathedral, one wolf, and the thirty-nine people who stayed when everything they believed began to change shape around them. Told across nine chapters - each one the companion to a track from the gothic power metal album of the same name - this is the record Brother Aldric kept of the year the doctrine ran out of room. It is the story of: Brother Cael, who named the wolf poison before he understood it was medicine. Widow Maret, who stopped being able to pretend on the night the congregation fractured. Davan, the farrier's boy, who slept beside the south door for months and named the compulsion before anyone else found the word. Brother Maren, whose trembling hands went still on the final morning and who said yes - for the second and final time. And the Bishop, who arrived with authority and left before dawn carrying something he had no language for. He was not a villain. His frame was simply too small. CRIMSON ADVENT is not a horror novel. It is not a fantasy novel. It is a gothic mythology about what happens when the sacred arrives in a form the architecture was not designed to hold - and thirty-nine people decide, without entirely understanding why, to hold it anyway. Non cecidi quia malus eram. Cecidi quia verum videbam. I did not fall because I was evil. I fell because I was seeing clearly. ― Part of the Dark Sacred Series: LUPUS POTESTATIS by Luca Noir. Companion album: Crimson Advent by LUPUS POTESTATIS. Available on all streaming platforms. MORS NON IMPERABIT