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The Split Pomegranate book cover

Book 6 of The Architecture of Survival

The Split Pomegranate

Two people who could read the memory held in stone and metal. One secret older than the kingdoms around them. And a love kept only across an impossible distance.

Setting Damascus, Jerusalem & Languedoc, 1140–1187 CE
Length ~91,000 words
Released August 8, 2026
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Free to read with Kindle Unlimited. Every book in the series stands alone.

About the Book

Eschiva bint Yehiel is a Jewish engineer in twelfth-century Damascus — she lays a hand to worked stone or metal and knows the maker, the year, the flaw waiting inside it. She builds the secret water of a great city, keeps a seal-trade for a cover, and lets no one close enough to learn what she truly guards: one chamber of a network six hundred years old that has carried forbidden knowledge through every collapse, and that she has protected alone since her mother died.

Brother Guilhem of Carcassonne, a Templar mason, can do the same impossible thing with his hands. When the two meet across the lines of the Second Crusade, each recognizes in the other the one truth neither can say aloud — and begins a love carried for twenty years in letters and coded seals, while the Order that shelters Guilhem moves to turn the network's inheritance into a registry of bloodlines it can own and breed.

The Split Pomegranate is a literary historical novel about what we agree to preserve and what we agree to become — two people holding something ancient against the fire, told the way Madeline Miller and Anita Diamant tell the past: intimate, exacting, and lit from within. It is Book 6 of The Architecture of Survival, and it stands entirely on its own.

More in the Series

Book 1

The Aethelred Cipher

Medieval Germany, 1347 CE
About the book
Book 2

The Genesis Protocol

Modern Era, 2019–2025
About the book
Book 3

The First Key

Bronze Age Egypt, 1177 BCE
About the book
Book 4

Love Remembers in Silence

Roman Judea, 26–42 CE
About the book
Book 5

What Augustine Hid

North Africa, 387–430 CE
About the book

Not sure where to start? See the reading order →