NEPHI

An old king at a forge on a far shore.

Two records before him and one graver - and the founding of a promised people to choose from: the sword the plates of the kings remember, or the plain wooden bow no record has ever kept. Jerusalem has stopped listening. One caravan lord goes out to pray and comes home carrying fire - and his fourth son, a forge-shed boy who was never for anything, says yes to an errand before he knows the road, and the family loses all the world can see: the house, the gold, the birthright, the city itself. From the drawn sword in a midnight street to the compass that shows the family its own face; from the steel bow that breaks on a mountain to the wooden one a starving boy makes and the question that restores a broken father; from the binding on the deep to a wife's ruling over ruined wrists. This is the founding the whole saga stands on, told by the founder himself: the brother who was loved and fought and bound and mourned, the vision that showed a boy both the coming of the Lamb to his children's children and the last hill where their story ends - and the man who planted anyway.

Book 2 of The Buried and the Kept - where the records begin, and the bow that never broke is handed, at the last engraving, to you.