The Custodia Parchments: The First Reading

By W. M. Chase

Every scholar who has looked closely at the earliest sources agrees on one thing: something doesn't add up. Elias Vance is not the first person to notice the gaps. He may be the first person with a machine built to close them.

What starts as a way to prove one professor wrong becomes, within weeks, a genuine discovery: a pattern of textual variance too consistent to be coincidence, running through fragments from monasteries and archives on opposite sides of the Mediterranean. Each new piece requires Elias to go further from home, and each trip leaves him a little more certain someone doesn't want him to arrive.

He meets Thea, a fellow researcher whose instincts about the material match his own, and whose company turns a lonely, strange year into something worth having. The accidents that follow her arrival are still small enough to explain away. So is the feeling that she is always, gently, pointing him somewhere other than where the evidence leads.

Book One ends with Elias's machine holding its first real reconstruction, not one answer but three, none of them safe, and Elias choosing, for the first time with his eyes open, to keep going anyway.

A dismissed fragment, a machine that shouldn't be able to read it this well, and a girl who was sent to make sure he stopped looking.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H9B1LXZ7
• ISBN13: 9798187717996
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 126 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"