Children of The Aren Tal

For three generations, the Circle Alliance believed its peace would last forever. It didn't - and what came after was not collapse, but discovery.

Hannah Vale begins as a copyist in the lower districts of Vael, translating trade certificates by lamplight. She ends among the stars, carrying a truth that reaches back further than any history she was ever taught: that the worlds she knows were not built by accident, and the silence between them was not empty - it was deliberate.

Children of the Aren Tal collects the complete saga in one volume - The Circle, The Validation, The Aren Tal, and the prequel Origins - the full story of a falsified history, the people who uncovered it, and the ancient civilization that seeded the truth long before anyone was ready to hear it.

Read the trilogy first. Let Origins answer the question it leaves you with last.

Edward C. Distel writes fiction shaped by memory, exile, war, and the quiet lives history often forgets. Raised in a multilingual household and deeply influenced by the immigrant experience, his work explores loyalty, identity, survival, and the stories people carry in silence.

Drawn to both novels and short fiction, Distel believes the most powerful stories are often the most intimate. His writing blends literary realism with psychological depth, creating characters marked as much by what they cannot say as by what they do.

He prefers to let his characters speak for themselves.

These are his first published works, though far from his only stories.