PROTOGONOS

Michelle Kessler has built her career on connecting the unconnectable. An award-winning investigative journalist, she trusts patterns, not instincts-until a single anomaly refuses to let go. Across years of interviews with powerful figures-a disgraced senator, a cult leader, a tech billionaire-she uncovers the same impossible detail: each of them describes a private encounter with someone they cannot remember. Not a mentor. Not a meeting. A presence. Afterward, everything changes. People listen differently. Doors open. Influence follows. When Michelle searches her archives, she finds more. Seventeen cases. No connection-except the same language, the same transformation, the same absence where a face should be.

As her investigation deepens, the pattern begins to push back. Sources vanish. Memories fracture. And those who speak of the encounter grow afraid-not of what they experienced, but of something still watching. Guided by a reclusive academic who has seen this before, Michelle is drawn into a hidden architecture beneath power itself-one that reaches back to the earliest human myths of Eros, not as the god of love, but as something far older: a force that selects, that binds, that makes the world want. But the closer Michelle gets to the truth, the more she feels it-subtle at first, then undeniable. People are starting to respond to her differently. And the most terrifying realization of all begins to take shape: she isn't just investigating the pattern. She's becoming part of it.

PROTOGONOS is a literary horror novel about desire as a force, influence as a system, and the cost of being seen in a world where power isn't earned-it's assigned.

For readers of Annihilation, The Fisherman, and House of Leaves.