The oldest war just found its last soldier
World War III ended a hundred years ago. The world never came back—steam replaced silicon, and civilization limped on in the ashes. Nobody noticed the other war. The one that never stopped.
Lance Kells is a nobody: a drifter, a failed novelist, a man who sold his childhood nightmares off to a bottle of pills years ago. Then his train gets stopped in the middle of nowhere by three things wearing human skin, and Lance watches them slaughter a car full of passengers for sport—right up until something on the roof starts picking them off one by one.
That something is Gabriel. Once one of Heaven's finest, now a fugitive from both sides of a war older than the human race—a war for the souls of mankind that neither Heaven nor Hell ever bothered to mention was still being fought. Gabriel didn't save Lance by accident. There's something inside him. Something even Death himself won't explain outright.
As Lance is dragged deeper into a fight between angels, demons, and everything in between, he starts remembering things he never lived through: the fall of Lucifer, the silence of a god who up and vanished, the birth of a weapon called the Cube of Metatron that could unmake the universe and start it over from scratch. And somebody, on one side or the other, is going to use it.
Fallen is an apocalyptic pulp epic about a war in Heaven that never ended, a god who left the building, and one very tired man caught holding the last match in a room full of gasoline. Equal parts scripture, splatter, and dark comedy—this is not your Sunday school's version of the end of the world.
World War III broke out in the year 2012.
No one knows exactly who or what launched the war. Records from this period are sketchy at best, without any sort of true indictment. Historians are torn on what the true cause of the war was. Some suspect it began in the early twenty-first century with the involvement of the United States of America in the Middle East. Others suspect the Chinese, who had been consolidating their power through the use of globalization over the years preceding the war, caused it. Still others hold the conflict between Israel and Palestine was the root, or India and Pakistan. Suspicions of ties in terrorism have also run rampant, with Saudi Arabia taking some of the blame as well. And a small percentage holds the European Union as the central aggressor.
What is known about the war is that nuclear weapons were used. Oil reserves were opened up to support the war effort, and some of them were even torched in an effort of further sabotage and defeat. The war lasted twenty years.
The Dark Ages known from history reclaimed the next century or so. Without any alternative energy sources, the world was forced to regress back to the era of steam-powered technology.
Now, one hundred years later, the true threat to humanity will make its presence known in this brave new world. A threat that has remained dormant for eons, but has secretly waged its own war throughout the ages.