T.A. Wexford

Keno has never held a blade, wielded a spell, or owned real leverage in his life. He survives on cold reads and desperate bluffs, dealing in words where others deal in blood. His latest contract requires him to slip inside the Keida Monastery and extract a captive named Chiyo. It should have been a suicide run; it is rapidly becoming something far worse.

Keida was not built as a sanctuary. It is a living tomb constructed around the Goshin—a submerged anomaly that is finally waking. As the relic stirs beneath the stone floors, the physical rules of the monastery begin to warp. Corridors stretch into endless shadow, the walls breathe with malice, and the zealous monks who hold the wards are losing their minds to paranoia. Trapped in a labyrinth that alters space, sound, and sanity, Keno must navigate a descending nightmare. When clever words fail against an entity that bends reality, he must discover what unbearable leverage he is willing to wager in a trap that will consume them all.

The drydocks of Shiranami are locked in iron chains. Under the ruthless eye of the naval provost, any shipwright caught altering hulls without a military clearance chit is hanged from the yardarms. Fumitaka only agreed to refit a privateer sloop in the dead of night because it was the only way to buy passage out of the disease-choked port for his foundling apprentices. But as he hammers the final heavy copper resonance plates onto the ship's keel, he uncovers the vessel's true purpose: it is not built to slip past the blockade, but to act as a massive kinetic bomb to ram the great sea-doors and drown Shiranami in a catastrophic tidal flood. With extremist zealots on one side and provost marines hunting him through the flooded slipways on the other, Fumitaka must take apart the ship he painstakingly built from the inside before it launches—and destroy his only way out.