Step into a world where the echoes of the past clash with the uncertain future in "The Chains of Orion," the third volume in Gordon Bonnet's trilogy, "Arc of the Oracles."
Thurial Keene, the revered Patriarch of Klen, holds the weight of history on his shoulders as the last living Oracle, a lineage stretching back fifteen centuries to the cataclysmic fall of Seattle, a city lost when when revolution, plague, and famine took down modern civilization.
During his long life he's seen technology finally reborn and science rekindled, and watched his own role devolve into mere figurehead, while fervent Zealots strive to resurrect archaic traditions through any means necessary - including violence.
As the tension between progress and superstition escalates, astronaut Kallman Dorn emerges, determined to undertake an ambitious and dangerous mission to explore and map the uncharted far-Earth side of the Moon.
Standing in Dorn's path is Dain Sarkos, leader of the Zealots, driven by his goal to quash rational science and revert to the dogmas of old. Caught in this clash of ideologies is the Patriarch himself, when a young archaeologist discovers a document written by Julia Lowell, one of the revered first Oracles of the Before Time. Her words, cautioning against the kind of narrow-minded zealotry that Sarkos represents, might hold the key to averting disaster. But can even the wisdom of the Blessed Julia herself dissuade the zealots from their destructive course? Or will humanity once more fall prey to its own self-destructive impulses and repeat its harrowing descent into chaos?
