This is the second book of Zyranna Zateli’s unfinished trilogy. A long time ago, at the beginning of time and at the farthest corner of the earth there was a gate. A locked gate. From all over the world men and women travelled with keys in their hands to open the gate. But the gate remained firmly shut. Anyone who believed that the dead of the first book had perished was proved wrong on New Year’s Eve, when all the “prodigals” returned. Overwhelmed in life by the elements of nature, by passions that the overworld could not support, they shook the soil from their collars and returned triumphantly, to dine as they once did with the living-the whole universe compressed within a night, the human drama in its entirety-until that venerable hour, the first dawn, came, to subdue again as they should in the darkness. And all this under the watchful, deep gaze of Lefka, who would later choose as her true pseudonym the strange name of Ramanthes Erebus. The little doe will gradually transform herself into a woman, always enigmatic, devoted to the glorious creations of her pen and destined to communicate with souls as leaves whisper when touched by the wind, guarding and at the same time portraying unspeakable secrets.

Kastaniotis, 2021, 724 p.