The Lanzón Speaks: A Novel of Ancient Peru and the Journey Within

By Randall H Scott

Peru, 900 BCE. A girl who hears the silence beneath the sound. A stone figure in an ancient gallery. A journey into the deepest room of the self.

Since she was five years old, Kimi has been going to a rock at the edge of her coastal fishing village before dawn. She lies on its cold surface and feels the silence beneath the sound - not the absence of noise but something older, something that the world is always resting on. She has no name for it. She has told almost no one.

When a senior priest from the temple at Chav n de Hu ntar arrives at her village and recognizes her in the way that people rarely recognize a twelve-year-old girl - as someone whose gift is already real and would be wasted if left unstructured - her mother makes the hardest decision love has ever asked of her. She lets her go.

What Kimi finds at Chav n de Hu ntar - a real ancient site, one of the most extraordinary ceremonial centers in the pre-Columbian world - is not what she expected. Not peace. Not simplicity. But a six-year education in the most demanding subject available: herself. The dark galleries and carved composite beings of the jaguar-human tradition. Two plant medicine ceremonies that take her to the edge of the self and reveal what the edge was protecting. A teacher who gives not wisdom but the structure to live in what his student already knows. A friendship that holds, and is tested, and holds again at a deeper level. And a final journey back to the coast - to a mother who is dying, to a rock that was always waiting, to the discovery that what she went to find had been with her all along.

The Lanz n Speaks is a novel about the timeless principles that have governed every genuine inner journey: that awareness precedes choice. That what we call our flaws are often our gifts, refused. That the deepest work is not the achievement of something extraordinary but the willingness to be fully what we already are. That love, expressed with enough generosity, sometimes looks indistinguishable from letting go.

Grounded in the real archaeology of Chav n de Hu ntar - its carved iconography, its acoustically designed galleries, its San Pedro ceremony traditions - the novel imagines the interior of a culture that left no written language but left extraordinary stone. It inhabits that silence and asks what it would have been like to be formed by such a place, across the years of a life.

For readers of The Alchemist, The Red Tent, Irapuru's Shaman, and The Poppy War - a novel about what it costs a person to become who they were always meant to be, and what becomes possible on the other side of that cost.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H1M78XBD
• ISBN13: 9798196695377
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.7" x 6.0"