The Romanov Oracle

Prologue

While memories of revolutions heavily focus on the fire and ash, let us not forget the humble spark. It’s the incendiary device that rips fabric from the seams and pulls hearts from their chests.

It was one couple who fanned a spark that became a flame, a duchess and a servant boy, who lit the match that burned down life as they knew it. They danced in the center of the fire’s afterglow and kissed the ash from one another’s cheeks.

Tsar Nicholas II ruled the Romanovs and the country with faith in his own infallibility. Suffering was simply Russia’s duty.

Poverty stretched as far as it did wide. While peasants burned crosses for warmth, the court burned the wood for vanity. Inside the palace, the wealthy adorned their feast tables with lobster and caviar, while beyond the gates, the people dined on stale bread and despair.

But all that glitters is not gold.

Something far more sinister lurked underneath the silver plating and rough-cut gemstones. It was a front that disguised old-world rituals that had been in effect for centuries.

There was an innumerable amount of secret cabinets, courts, and committees — all with one tie to some religion or another or some secret lord of the state. It turned the political subterfuge in the Winter Palace into a melting pot of black magic and Latin recitations of the Lord’s Prayer.

Every dance held midnight incantations. Every song was a prayer played backward, and every jewel was cursed. In the halls of the Winter Palace, behind the masks, priests and khlysts hid among the saints.

The Romanovs' increasing paranoia and grip on the edge of their dynasty’s gilded seat led them to seek counsel from the dvoryanstvo, the nobility, and, more secretly, their priests.

A delicate balance between money and religion split the family in two, with the tsarina clinging to her priests and the tsar to his nobles.

Into this whirl of fanaticism and opulence was Anastasia Romanova born, the last vessel of her family’s forbidden magic, which her mother had prayed against, and her father had exorcised.

Beneath her skin, a spark was gathering, one destined to ignite and incinerate everything in its path. When it finally burned, nothing would remain but ashes.

History would whisper two names like a prayer and a curse, one true, one false: Rasputin and Anastasia.