A stricken spirit is unbearable.
Unrequited love insufferable.
And yet, the search for forever has begun.

In the dusk of the eighteenth century, an unthinkable mêlée rises from the South of France. Following the trail of his lost father, an adrift young man crosses deadly paths with an eccentric, self-proclaimed king concocting a horrendous plot and an unliveable dream. The entanglement that holds the lives of a whole province in the balance will go stretching from Southern France all the way to hidden islands and unsearched depths of Africa. Royals and beggars, assassins and traitors, beasts both human and animal, liars, rogues, a clandestine guild with a fatal secret, some wayward and a few with honor, and a light-fingered Spanish-Moroccan girl on a quest all her own . . . all will struggle for forever.

The search for forever has begun.