A TRILOGY
PIETRANERA
LOMBARDY & THE HIGH
ALPINE CORRIDORS | 1356-1479
You do not go looking for a thing like this. Once it finds you, It comes as surely as the weather. First as but a lonely cloud crossing the sky, no heavier than a shadow on a field, easily dismissed and easily forgotten; if it not a messenger bringing in the storm. It doesn't suffer your preference, It learns your hours, and keeps them. And then one morning you understand that the arrangement has quietly reversed itself, that you are no longer the one holding the story at all, the story is holding you:
And the world you walk through, has been changed in every particular. What it opened was a realm: a world raised up stone upon stone, a history bent by a careful hand from the true record, and people so close, so intimately flawed and vulnerable and alive, that to leave them unspoken; would feel like a betrayal.
You have been taken by it so utterly.
So you write, and you build.
WHY HAVE
YOU COME?
"He had felt it a thousand times and had never once known he was committing it to memory. He knew it now. He would hold it clenched in his fist for the rest of his life."
PIETRANERA is historical fiction set into the true record, the way a wall is set into bedrock. Real battles, real roads, real bells in real towers; and threaded through the mortar of the story runs a fine dark seam of what might have been. The reader who knows the history will feel the ground shift beneath. The reader who does not, will never be certain where the record ends & invention begins, that uncertainty is the point of the blade.
Unphased by the march of medieval novels that have come before. It is built as a fortress is built, by exacting methods. The reader will not predict the moments turning, and will not afterward forget. I am told in ways that have not been before. Each stone gathered within the mountain. Across three books, one question, one hundred and twenty years to answer. The gates are closed. The walls are rising. What waits inside, gives nothing away.
IT CAN NEVER
BE THE SAME
"Most men read the device as a threat. He had always found it more honest than that. It was not a warning. It was an account, already rendered, to take a man into itself without haste, headfirst, and to go on taking him in until the man was gone and the snake was ever larger."
PIETRANERA is strictly a human work. Its world, its people, its history and its every word are conceived and written by Jesse Hayes; a novel from one mind and one heart, not written by AI. Where the archive ran deeper than one life could possibly dig, AI carried the lantern over research alone.
The story will not be hurried or suffer haste. A wall stands by what it was refused: the poor stone turned away, the quick mortar left in the trough, the course lifted out and laid again for the fault of a single finger’s width.
The one thing that cannot be bought, begged or quarried; is time. This story will be given all it needs. The books will come as the courses are true.
What waits behind the gates cannot be told here, and will not be. Only this: somewhere in these three parts, there is a stone laid where no reader will think to look for it, and it bears more weight than any wall in history. The day you find it, then discover the truth; you will go back to the first page and begin again. And it will not be the same journey twice. It can never be the same.
What we build outlasts us. What we bury does not.
