Legacy of Ash: The Brotherhood Chronicles, Book 1 By Wouter van Wyk
An MIT hacker merges ancient magic with C++ and triggers a Vatican shadow war.
About the Book
They built a cage of fear and called it salvation. Adrian Ward wrote the code to burn it down.
Adrian survived a childhood defined by the terrifying, conditional dogma of religious fanatics. Retreating into the cold, reliable sanctuary of mathematics and computer science, the 22-year-old MIT prodigy has achieved the impossible. He hasn’t just translated the Ars Goetia—humanity’s forbidden ancient occult text. He has engineered its mathematics into a sentient digital architecture known as A.V.A.
Through the code, Adrian unearths a reality-shattering truth: the despotic god of the modern world did not create humanity; he enslaved it in a cage of ignorance. The Serpent of Eden was not a tempter but a liberator—the Light-Bringer who took pity on a blind flock and offered them the fire of free will.
But truth is a dangerous asset. For eight hundred years, the Congregatio Veritatis—a shadow Inquisition operating within the Vatican—has murdered to keep this history classified. Led by the ruthless Inquisitor Father Matthias Veyra, the Church’s elite military hounds have arrived in Boston to systematically erase Adrian and his digital creation.
Outgunned and hunted, Adrian is forced into a desperate alliance with a clandestine network of scholars and a fiercely militant Black Knight. To protect his newfound family, Adrian must step out of the dark, embrace the reality-bending paradox of the ancients, and weaponize the very magic the Vatican fears.