Sylvie L. Galloway

Deep in the impassable Parnassos Mountains lies Katerinia, a sanctuary city built for those who have nowhere else to flee. Its survival rests in the hands of its Lock-Ward, a woman who knows its subterranean gates and hidden paths better than anyone. When an early, catastrophic winter seals the pass, she finds herself trapped alongside the man who condemned her mentor to die. He claims he did it to preserve the sanctuary; she knows it was a calculated murder disguised as justice.

He holds the political authority and commands the upper city. She controls the keys and regulates what stays alive in the deepening dark. What begins as a bitter siege of mirrored sabotage and secret moves gradually binds them to the same desperate end. To keep Katerinia from plunging into chaos, they will have to rely on each other’s unique leverage. The line between sworn adversaries blurs under the pressure of isolation, shifting loyalty, and the lethal cold, driving them toward a climactic choice before the spring thaw brings reckoning from the outside world.

For three hundred years, the Housen Grounds have held back a withering, flesh-eating fog known as the Shigai. The only thing keeping it contained is a blood-bound occupancy: two descendants must live within its rotting walls every night, or the bounds break.

Kiyomi walked away from the Meisho Cordon’s military ranks rather than feed innocent lives to their war machine. Branded a coward and a deserter, she has nowhere left to run when she is dragged to the Housen Grounds to serve as a replacement occupant. There, she meets Naoto—a rigid, arrogant loyalist of the very Cordon she despises, sworn to uphold the rules even as the estate tries to kill them both.

Tethered together in a haunted manor, they have to survive the Shigai’s nightly horrors and fulfill the Cordon's impossible demands. But as Kiyomi begins to use her unsanctioned combat tactics to carve out a foothold in the estate, the two bitter rivals realize the curse isn't a natural disaster. The institution they are desperately holding together might be the very thing that wants them dead.