What Has Gone Before
In 1681, in his laboratory at Trinity College, Isaac Newton discovered Philosopher's Mercury, the key to matter and energy, and from this discovery came a flood of inventions.
Heatless alchemical lights brightened the night streets of London and Paris. Aetherschreibers sent messages instantaneously around the globe. Kings and princes commissioned terrible new weapons with which to fight their wars.
And in Boston, a young man named Benjamin Franklin sought his destiny. Not happy as his brother's printing apprentice, Ben longed to study the scientific. He read and dreamed in his spare time, and through his studies, he found a way to modify an aetherschreiber to receive not only the messages intended for it, but also to eavesdrop on any that might be floating in the aether. He fell into correspondence with an unknown mathematician, one striving to complete a complex calculus equation. Blinded by his love for science, when Franklin saw the solution to the problem, he shared it immediately.
A continent away, Adrienne de Mornay de Montchevreuil was also searching for her path in life. Not content with the roles available to her gender, her forbidden love for mathematics found a release when she became secretary to the philosopher Fatio de Duillier. De Duillier was employed by Louis XIV, the absolute monarch of France, and his work was of an urgent and secret nature.
Though Adrienne never understood—or much cared about—the purpose of the research she was participating in, when a mysterious correspondent on the aetherschreiber offered her part of the solution, she immediately saw the implications and made practice from theory.
Thus together, Benjamin Franklin and Adrienne de Montchevreuil solved a mathematical problem and changed the world as profoundly as Newton had.
Each independently concluded that they had given Louis the XIV the weapon he needed to end his war with England. Each raced desperately to stave off disaster. Ben sailed to England, in hopes Sir Isaac could help. Adrienne turned to the dangerous intrigues of the French court.
Both failed.
Using their calculations, the philosophers of the Sun King pulled a comet from the heavens and obliterated London. But they hadn't foreseen the full consequences of their actions. Much of Europe was also devastated, plunging western civilization into a new dark age.
Ben was in London, apprenticed to Sir Isaac, when the comet began its fall. Seduced and kidnapped by Vasilisa Karevna, an agent of the Russian tsar Peter I, he watched in helpless horror as the center of the English Empire was destroyed. He lost a brother, many friends, and his innocence.
Adrienne—whose quest brought her to the very bed of the insane King Louis—lost much more; her true love, Nicolas, her virginity, and her hand. Then, in the aftermath of the comet, she made yet another discovery—she was with child, the child of Louis XIV.
Moving behind the bright world of matter, other forces were at work. In the spaces between atoms, certain beings who did not want humanity to possess the secrets of alchemy— beings who had subtly guided the course of human history— now began to be less subtle. However, unable to work directly in the world of matter, they used human agents to achieve their ends, posing as angels, demons, or djinni. The cataclysm precipitated by Ben and Adrienne was ultimately of their design, and they planned more damage to humanity.
Newton called these beings the malakim, naming them for the angels of the Old Testament.
The malakim moved carefully, offering their aid to certain philosophers, plotting the deaths of others.
Rescued from Karevna by Newton, Franklin continued his apprenticeship with the great philosopher, whose work had turned entirely to a science of the malakim. Adrienne, too, was seduced by their power. Her missing hand was mysteriously replaced with the hand of an angel, enabling her to see the very structure of the aether and of matter—and to alter it as she saw fit. Gradually, she became more sorceress than mathematician and learned that the malakim, too, were torn by strife. One of their factions desired to suppress humanity's search for knowledge. The other sought the absolute extinction of the race.
Meanwhile, the world plunged further into turmoil. Driven by ever-harder winters, Tsar Peter built a fleet of airships and embarked on a quest to conquer the weakened nations of Europe. Across the Atlantic, a Choctaw shaman named Red Shoes joined with the Sieur de Bienville, the pirate Edward Teach, and the Puritan minister Cotton Mather in an expedition to discover what had become of the Old World.
All were drawn together in a battle for the city of Venice. In that battle, Ben watched as Adrienne was forced to kill Isaac Newton. And for Adrienne there was another tragedy—her infant son, Nicolas, was kidnapped by the malakim.
Adrienne found a new home in Russia, as a philosopher in the court of Peter the Great, and Benjamin returned to the American colonies to settle in the city of Charles Town, South Carolina.
For ten years, an illusory calm prevailed. The Russian Empire, foiled at Venice, instead pushed eastward, across Siberia to the western shores of America. In Saint Petersburg, Adrienne attracted students and sycophants and built ever-more terrible weapons for the Tsar. Benjamin created a secret society to keep the Americas free of the influence of the malakim.
But this calm was not to last. Red Shoes, the Choctaw shaman, followed signs into the great western plains and found an army on the march, an army composed of Russian, Mongol, and Native American troops, led by the mysterious and powerful Sun Boy. In Charles Town, Ben confronted the sudden appearance of James Stuart, the Pretender to the English throne, come to claim the American colonies as his rightful kingdom. Ben quickly discovered that Stuart was backed by Russian submersibles and troops. After making the knowledge public, Ben fled Charles Town to a wilderness fort, where he and other leaders of the English colonies met with James Oglethorpe, the Margrave of the renegade colony of Azilia, with various Native American leaders, and with a band of free Africans known as Maroons. They determined to resist the Pretender and any other continental power that threatened to extend its influence in the New World.
Ben then set off for New France, through the territory of the powerful Coweta tribe, in hopes of winning both the French and the Coweta to his cause. On reaching the Coweta, he discovered that the Pretender's men had already arrived by air under the leadership of a malakim warlock named Alexander Sterne. Captured by the Coweta, Ben faced torture and death until rescued by his ally Don Pedro of Apalachee.
In Russia, the tsar mysteriously vanished, and Adrienne found herself facing a hostile new leadership and an even more hostile church. Assembling her students and soldiers loyal to the tsar, she set forth to discover Peter's whereabouts. In doing so, she discovered the secret invasion of North America, and worse, that its leader—the Sun Boy—was her own lost child, Nicolas. She also found that the philosopher Swedenborg had invented dark engines capable of allowing the most powerful of the malakim to wreak havoc in the world of matter. Facing one of these engines, she could do nothing more than flee, for no science or spell in her possession could affect it.
Tsar Peter, meanwhile, a captive of his own lieutenants, escaped them with the aid of Red Shoes. He vowed to regain control of his nation and end the war. Guided by Red Shoes, a Wichita man named Flint Shouting, and a former pirate named Tug, the Tsar set off for New Paris.
On the journey, however, Red Shoes was forced to fight a powerful malakus, and in defeating it became corrupted by its power. His companions watched in horror as he murdered the people of Flint Shouting's village. They escaped Red Shoes, continuing alone.
This did not concern Red Shoes, for in his power-driven madness he had conceived a new agenda—the destruction of the world and the making of a new one.
From the aether, the malakim guide their army and marshal their dark engines, bent on destroying the last bastion of resistance to their plans—New Paris.