Carving the Living Sutra in Bone

von Gerard Faughnan

152 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

"Liberation is not the absence of pain. It is the courage to burn with the world."Coughing black bile onto frost-slicked timber, Kael crawls across the colossal suspension bridge to Chorten-Drak. Behind him lies a bloody past as an elite assassin; ahead lies the vow of absolute silence. Dying from an incurable pulmonary poison, Kael believes submission to monastic asceticism is the righteous sentence for his sins. He expects solitary penance. He expects oblivion.He does not expect an acoustic slaughterhouse.Perched high above a petrified gorge, Chorten-Drak does not honor the dead-it harvests them. Monks strip human remains in boiling lye, grinding relics to fuel the colossal Great Bronze Bell whose crushing resonant strikes trap the spirits of the chasm in an inescapable metaphysical dome. But the monastery's darkest mystery rests suspended within the Inner Sanctum: the Śūnyatā Scripture, a human skeleton etched in living cinnabar and mercury that bleeds cyan light whenever Kael approaches.When Kael accidentally touches the relic's left femur, a phantom agony fires down his limb. The ancient bone bears the exact calcified spiral fracture of a forgotten childhood injury. He is no mere wanderer seeking absolution; his flesh is the living reincarnation of the ascetic whose remains form the very foundation of the monastery's dark canon.As a total lunar eclipse looms, the horrific truth unravels. Sifting through sealed subterranean archives, Kael discovers that every holy master he murdered in his youth was orchestrated by Abbot Jigten-a systematic harvest to exterminate compassion from the mortal plane. Jigten's path to liberation is not transcendence, but cosmic suicide designed to freeze existence into an emotionless purgatory. And the living scripture lacks only one final chapter: the unbroken spinal column of the saint reborn.When Owen, a terrified deaf novice, is locked in an iron cage to be measured for the ritual, Kael's illusion of passive penance shatters. Inaction is not holiness; allowing the slaughter of innocence makes him complicit. Yet in a citadel ruled by acoustic horror and metaphysical chains, blades cannot bring salvation. To shatter the cage of Chorten-Drak, Kael must endure the ultimate agony: refraining from vengeance and opening his poisoned body to absorb the boundless terror of every trapped soul through radical, unconditional compassion (Mahākaruṇā).Carving the Living Sutra in Bone is a breathtaking masterwork of dark metaphysical fantasy and visceral somatic dread. Seamlessly blending the bone-chilling atmosphere of grimdark horror with the profound depths of esoteric Buddhist philosophy, this harrowing epic explores guilt, reincarnation, and the razor-thin line between detachment and annihilation.Step across the threshold of bone. The final verse is waiting to be inscribed.

• Themen: Belletristik Fantasyliteratur Dark Fantasy
• ISBN: 9798182764681
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 12.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: GERARD FAUGHNAN