Strange Aeons: Book 1 of the Black Planet Trilogy

Nikola Bellascu is a comfortable, respected professor of Egyptology and Oriental Studies at the University of Carpathia - but he's never been out of his home country. It's been 50 years since the Apocalypse literally blasted Europe back to the Stone Age, and what formerly was Romania and Hungary is now the Principality of Carpathia, a highly patriarchal Dark Age society that's just reached the threshold of the Age of Steam. But Bellascu is the Dark Continent's leading authority on ancient Egypt, thanks largely to a set of seven ancient books that fell out of a secret wall in an ancient crag-top castle damaged in the Cataclysm.

One day a strange, assertive woman from a faraway land called Anglia offers him more silver than he has ever seen in his life to guide her to an abandoned city in Egypt. He agrees; then she drugs his wine, and when he wakes up, he's on an airship traveling through the desert. The airship is full of the most modern technology, which seems like unadulterated magic to him.

When they arrive at their destination, he is, like Neo after taking the red pill, plunged into a world in which nothing is what it appears to be - not even his own body. Monsters that he thought were mythological figments of ancient lore turn out to be all too real - and are poised to snuff out the life of the woman he loves.