Isaac Stage

Chronologica Isaac Stage

If time travel is possible, we should find evidence in the past... Metropolitan Museum archivist, Emerson Steigman discovers just that, temporal incongruities in a series of letters written in 1429 by Maria de Savoy. Is this evidence of time travel? Will anyone believe him? In the winter of 1428, young Maria de Savoy is betrothed to the despotic Duke Filippo Visconti. Marriage to the Duke is a fate worse than death. The Duke beheaded his previous wife, and now imprisons Maria with only a deck of cards to keep her company. However, deep in the dungeon's darkness she discoveries a mysterious prisoner known only as Il Insolito, "the strange." Ambitious paleontologist, Dr. Fredrick Dracozan returns from Wyoming with a fossilized skull that will forever change his life. Joined by the physicist Vince Vogel, aggrieved over time-travel's luring possibilities to save those he loved from death, the damaged Natalie Carranza, a linguistic genius with a tragic past, and Charles Advenire a wisecracking test pilot, the team begins to unravel the mystery of a machine discovered in the deserts of southern California. When the machine accidentally plunges them into the Neoproterozoic, 650 million years in the past, the team starts a journey across the geologic epochs, chased by a mysterious future species-- a species that manipulates time by annihilating the universe. Interweaving these stories, the novel presents an epic adventure that explores the vastness of time, the possibility of time travel and the transcendence of love across the ages.