Twelve thousand years ago, a comet smashed into Earth.
Livia is the last of those shamans. The world is again crumbling around her, and she descends into the darkest realms of spirit to find the way to save her dying homeland.
But every gift
has its price, and Livia finds the answers she seeks because she is willing to
pay that price. And now it seems the consequences will destroy everything she
wanted to save.
Broken
Skies is the first book in a series about the dawn of
civilisation and the continuing legacy of our ancient history. It was inspired
by the discovery of Göbekli Tepe in
southeast Turkey, dated to 9600BCE and dubbed the oldest temple in the world.
The
people of this time developed agriculture and complex stone-working
technologies, and their legacy led to the development of city states and
civilisation as we know it today. They may also have inspired the legends told
across the Middle East of the gods, angels and demons who educated, subjugated
and almost destroyed humankind.
Broken
Skies tells the story of how this all began.
Göbekli Tepe sits on a hilltop in the midst of the vast Harran Plain,
where it dominates the landscape for miles around. Its stone pillars are carved
with snarling lions, poisonous snakes, wild boars, foxes, vultures and other
dangerous wild creatures, and were once hung with human skulls. It is a
sinister and unsettling place.
It was perhaps used to initiate
shamans and hunters, or for rites of adulthood in a world where life was tough
and death was often only a step away. What people endured among Göbekli Tepe’s savage array of spirits prepared them for this brutal
life.
Little is known about the people
who built Göbekli Tepe. Until recently it was
believed the hunters and foragers of 12,000 years ago were still millennia away
from complex building work and other skills which are considered the hallmarks
of civilisation. Göbekli Tepe and other contemporary
sites across the Middle East are redefining everything we once knew.
Legend perhaps tells us more
about the people who gifted us so much. Across the Middle East, from Sumerian
mythology to Biblical legends, there are stories about a race of gods, angels
or demons, who could take the form of animals and fly like birds. They were
skilled in medicine, magic and agriculture, they studied the stars and could read
the future in the skies, and they taught these gifts to humankind.
Legends also talk of a
devastating war between them, which was linked to the teaching of these
forbidden gifts.
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