Elias Ward Origins

Before Subtle. Before Dormant. There was Elias Ward.

Elias Ward was never supposed to survive his childhood. He fell into snow deep enough to bury him, dropped fifteen feet onto a dead log, and was thrown through a car crash that should have killed him. He never broke a bone.

At twenty-five, he is drafted for Vietnam. He has a wife, a young son, and another child on the way. Then his orders change, and no one will tell him why.

Instead of the jungle, Elias is blindfolded and driven into a mountain in Colorado. In a facility that doesn't officially exist, the government has been collecting artifacts from restricted excavations in western China: stone fragments carved in a language no one can read, and a bone that isn't human, isn't animal, and isn't dead.

They brought him in as a linguist, and they want results. But Elias sees what they won't. This isn't a discovery. Someone buried these things on purpose, and the people digging them up have no idea what they're rebuilding.

Elias follows the trail from a sealed chamber beneath the Vatican archives to a flight bound for ancient Shinar, and it leads back to Nimrod and the Tower of Babel. Along the way, a soldier named Daniel Mercer, who never seems to age, keeps appearing exactly when he's needed. And while Elias is half a world away, something closes in on the family he left behind.

Some ideas don't die. They lie dormant, waiting for a generation that believes it can finish what was started.

Elias Ward - Origins is the prequel to the series that continues in Subtle and Dormant. It's a Christian supernatural thriller of Cold War secrets, forbidden history, spiritual warfare, and the cost of standing watch.