The Guardian's Circle

A Story of Loss, Healing, and Faith

After a tragic car accident takes his parents, Pericles Vegard grows up carrying a grief that never fully leaves him. Nightmares follow him into waking life, and no treatment can ease the fear, pain, and loneliness that shape his days.

When doctors discover a massive brain tumor, Pericles is pushed even deeper into despair. Chemotherapy leaves him weak, isolated, and struggling to hold on. But in the quiet of a hospital room, restrained and broken by suffering, an unexpected visitor arrives with one simple offer: a prayer.

By morning, everything changes.

Gabriel Bloor’s The Guardian’s Circle is an emotional story of anguish, mystery, and faith, following one man’s journey through trauma, illness, and a miracle no one can explain.

Discover The Guardian’s Circle and experience a moving story about hope when all seems lost.

Excerpt from the book

Bright lights are flashing red and blue. There is a hum of equipment running, mixed with the sound of metal groaning. A fireman kept calling to me; his voice went in and out. The lights are fading in and out. A realization comes that I am fading in and out of consciousness. Then there was a strange sensation in my hand; my brain was struggling to comprehend it. Everything was so fuzzy, the sounds were weird, and it felt like my head was stuffed full of wool. Then there was a sharp pain that cleared everything; the fireman’s face became clear, his voice loud in my ears.

“Can you hear me?” the fireman shouted. I looked at him and responded, “Yes.” My voice sounded gravelly and hoarse. I realized that my throat was dry, and I was very thirsty. I understood that I was wedged in a car. I could not make out the car’s shape; everything looked wrong. I remember riding down the road with Mom and Dad. I remember hearing their conversation about work. I now remember the sound of my mother’s scream, the odd jerk of the car, and the loud sound of metal crunching. My mother’s scream suddenly silenced, then pain and heat.

The fireman squeezed my hand again and snapped me back to my situation. His voice still sounded muffled, but I could make out that they were working on the car to get me out. I had been thrown forward in the initial crash, and my parents’ seats became my covering as the car was crushed from above. Unknown to me, the reason I had even been discovered was because of my foot hanging out of the side door. The fireman who was working to comfort me was the one who had seen it and called it in. The other firemen were cutting the twisted wreckage, working to find the path that would bring about my freedom.

Suddenly, the pain in my leg increased, and I screamed. I squeezed the fireman’s hand for all I was worth, not knowing that the final cut had been completed and I had been freed from the car. My pain was from the blood flowing back through my pinned leg, and it ignited the nerves of the damage that had been done to my leg. The fireman scooped me up, and for the first time, I could see the car—it was flat. Where the windshield was supposed to be was the back end of a semi-tractor trailer, one set of the dual tires of the trailer resting on where my dad would have been sitting. I could see his hand reaching toward where my mother was sitting. There was nothing else of him to see, just blood everywhere. My eyes went to where my mother was; it too was a mangled mess of metal and blood. A wisp of hair just above the metal carnage marked where she had died.

There was a loud scream as anguish flooded my body. The fireman struggled to get me out from underneath the trailer without seeing the wreck, but his attempt was not successful. Forever would that image be burned in my mind. Forever would I see that wisp of my mother’s hair and the outstretched hand of my father, and forever would I hear her final scream.