THE BONES OF ST. AURELIA Ascension of My Dragons – Volume II by Prof. Dr. Bankole Johnson In The Bones of St. Aurelia , Prof. Dr. Bankole Johnson delivers one of the most mesmerizing and devastating entries in The Forensic Cycle — a story where faith, science, and the hunger for immortality intertwine beneath the crumbling facades of a coastal Italian town. When a violent tremor splits the marble floor of Santa Aurelia Cathedral, the townspeople believe Heaven has spoken. Beneath the nave lies a sealed crypt containing a skeleton wrapped in cloth of gold, perfumed and intact after centuries. The Church calls it a miracle. Scientists call it impossible. Reporters descend like moths. Pilgrims weep in the streets. And from the shadows, a whisper begins. That the relics are false, that the saint never lived, that someone has raised the dead for reasons far from divine. Father Matteo Bellori, a Jesuit priest and neuroscientist fallen from grace, is summoned home to verify the relic’s authenticity. But the bones tell a different story: fractures healed in patterns no martyr could bear, traces of rare isotopes, ritual scoring on the skull. Each test he performs seems to awaken the remains, as though consciousness still flickers in calcium and dust. Soon after his arrival, a child disappears, and when her body is found near the reliquary, her wounds mirror those of the supposed saint. Matteo’s investigation draws him into the orbit of Dr. Lucia Ferrante, a brilliant forensic anthropologist who believes that sanctity may be an evolutionary mutation, that miracles are a form of contagion passed from host to host. Together they uncover a chain of secret experiments, sanctioned by the Church and buried by time, seeking to engineer holiness through suffering. As visions spread through the town: the bleeding of icons, and the convulsions of the faithful, Aurelia becomes a theatre of hysteria and revelation. The line between miracle and madness dissolves. The cathedral trembles under the weight of its own faith. For Matteo and Lucia, every discovery deepens the wound: the relics may be the remnants of a cult devoted to transformation through pain, where salvation was measured in fractures and redemption in bone dust. To reveal the truth would shatter the last illusion holding the town together. Yet, to remain silent would make them complicit in sanctified deceit. In the book’s luminous climax, the cathedral becomes both autopsy chamber and altar. The bones of the saint, irradiated by centuries of veneration, seem to breathe. Matteo must choose between revelation and ruin, between the purity of truth and the mercy of belief. The Bones of St. Aurelia is a meditation on corruption and grace, on how the sacred corrodes when exposed to light. It extends the grand architecture of Ascension of My Dragons : where The Divided Earth explored the fractures of identity, this volume descends into the strata of faith itself — its fossils, its parasites, its hidden beauty. In Johnson’s signature prose — precise, lyrical, and incandescent with moral tension — the novel redefines the gothic for the age of molecular evidence. It is a work of science and spirit, of love and heresy, of what remains when the flesh is gone and only testimony endures. Here, the miracle is not that bones survive the centuries — but that they still whisper, and we still dare to listen.