A King’s Promise · A Novel

THE MANIFEST

A Tejano One Hundred Years of Solitude aboard a generation ship — where the magical realism is just general relativity.

Vicente Gabriel Flores

Six hundred years after a family founded a town at the fork of two rivers, the same family is still crossing.

The generation ship La Villa de San Miguel del Cielo is braking toward the first living world any human eye has ever found — a valley of bronze-green lichen between two rivers, four billion years innocent of us. Sixteen-year-old Ana Curbelo Flores, apprentice Chronicler, must testify before a divided ship on the one question six centuries of crossing never settled: whether they have the right to land at all.

THE MANIFEST is a concentrated mythic epic in the lineage of Rulfo and García Márquez — a saga of one Tejano family told not across a hundred years but across the dark between stars, where the dead are not behind the living but in the next room, and the only crossing that finally matters is the width of a table. No hemos llegado aún a la vendimia.

The Invocation opens every work of A King’s Promise — from LA TOMA, Opening Chorus

A king’s promise:
title and land, hijos dalgo de solar conocido —
a name behind the name, by right of birth.

The promise was kept.
In seventeen-thirty, from Tenerife
the harness-maker’s son sailed;
crossed the Atlantic; rode the camino real;
and at the fork of two rivers made his stand —
Vicente Álvarez Travieso,
alguacil mayor de Béxar.
The grant was real. The river was real. The land was real.

Then the king died.
The empire fell.
The wars came: Mexican, Texan, American, Civil, Mexican again.
The flags changed — five of them, sometimes in a week.
The marshal came. The bandits came. The federales came.

What was given was taken.
What was taken was won back.
What was won back was taken again.

On the Shelf · Where it stands

A haunted epic, not a long one.

i.

The concentrated road

Two roads lead to epic. García Márquez sprawls across a hundred forty thousand words; Rulfo haunts in forty. THE MANIFEST takes Rulfo’s road — Pedro Páramo aboard a starship — a whole saga rung like myth in a single sitting.

ii.

The science is load-bearing

The magic is the physics. Light-lag makes grief literal; relativity puts the dead in the next room; a vegetation red-edge is how the ship hears a living world. Nothing is hand-waved. The wonder is true.

iii.

A Tejano voice in space

The saga carries San Antonio de Béxar to another sun — Spanish kept for the threshold, English arriving a beat later, lossy, the way the truest things in this family have always been carried.

iv.

It earns its ending

A divided ship, a hidden mercy, a reckoning, and a landing made not as conquerors but as the seventeenth family — entered first on the record, owing the valley everything.

The Manifest · Particulars

Submission details

StatusManuscript complete
Length≈ 49,600 words
CategoryLiterary fiction · Hard science fiction
StructureFive acts · Twenty chapters · Five placed poems
SeriesA King’s Promise — reads fully standalone; no prior volume required
Comparable toAnthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land · Simon Jimenez, The Vanished Birds
In the tradition ofJuan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo · Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

The Chronicle · Kept by hand

Index

Five acts, each closing on a placed poem — the family’s record of the crossing.

ACT I DepartureChapters One – Eight closes onThe Column
ACT II The BridgeChapters Nine – Eleven closes onThe Bolt of the Old Door
ACT III The VoteChapters Twelve – Fifteen closes onThe Crossing
ACT IV The BrakingChapters Sixteen – Eighteen closes onThe Bridge of Time
ACT V LandfallChapters Nineteen – Twenty closes onThe Far Crossing

The Chronicler · About the author

Vicente Gabriel Flores

Vicente Gabriel Flores writes from Austin, Texas. His work forms a single saga — A King’s Promise — that follows one Tejano family from the 1730s founding of San Antonio de Béxar across the centuries, the wars, the five flags, and, in THE MANIFEST, across the dark between stars.

His debut novel, PASADOR, follows the same river the saga has always followed: the one that does not distinguish between Villa, or Hollywood, or Ambrose Bierce, and keeps running south regardless. Across both books the preoccupations hold — lineage and loss, the record kept by hand, what a family carries when everything else is taken and taken again.

He signs his letters cronista — the chronicler — because that, in the end, is the only office his books have ever described.

vicentegabrielflores.com @pasadornovel cronista@vicentegabrielflores.com

For Agents & Editors

◆ Complete & seeking representation ◆

Request the manuscript.

The full manuscript, a synopsis, and additional sample pages are available to agents and editors on request. Queries are read by the author directly.

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or write to cronista@vicentegabrielflores.com · @pasadornovel