The Empire of Heaven

In a kingdom where the emperor is seen as a reincarnated god, his court and empire maintains a fragile control of his territories by his elaborate system of power controlled by powerful nuns known as the Sisterhood. A secretive hierarchy of nuns and the women they train, the highest and most powerful of the Sisterhood select and release the carefully chosen young Handmaids to all the nobility in the kingdom as official concubines. Only one of the 27 noble houses, the Lesleys, have historically refused to copulate with these highly trained beautiful women, while the rest had their bloodlines integrated with the Sisterhood and by extension irrevocably tying their allegiance to the empire. But the true maintenance of the power check against the noblemen would be the emperor’s decree that every generation, a group of noble women, daughters of noble and royal birth, are gathered from the 27 houses to be forcibly joined into the service of the Sisterhood as a group known as the Oracles; women who are feared and revered by all for holding fearsome, mystical powers gifted by god. When the young heiress of House Lesley is called upon to be an Oracle, she unwittingly finds herself becoming the face of the revolution that has been long brewing against the Empire of Heaven. ~~ This is a dramatic saga of warring families and political betrayals under the guise of faith and beliefs. Inspired greatly by the wars of religion in Western Europe and the subsequent spread towards the rest of the known world as well as other well known epics about the fight for supremacy and the use of fear to maintain control. ~~