Ember Chain
The city hums. Most people feel nothing. The ones who do end up in the Archive.
Caldrath has an institution called the Archive. For six generations it has monitored the city's harmonic lattice — the planetary frequency conducted through stone and water — and selected candidates for what it calls processing. The city calls it necessary. No one asks the candidates.
Seren Aderyn is an Archive auditor who found the pattern. Intake selections correlating with civic dissent. Medical outcomes worse than documented. Three records that simply stop. She built the case, escalated it through proper channels, and trusted the institution to correct itself.
The knock came before she finished writing.
Laoch is a professional infiltrator hired to retrieve a ledger from a political benefactor's private study. He retrieved it. He read it. He found her name next to two words: optimal candidate.
He told himself it was a job. He was already lying.
Ember Chain is a dual-POV dark fantasy of institutional corruption, political machinery, and the specific cost of being right too early. Set in Caldrath — a canal city built on the kind of civic rot that outlasts the people who built it — it follows two characters who approach the same truth from opposite directions and arrive at the same conclusion: the institution doesn't make mistakes. It makes choices.
For readers of: The Lies of Locke Lamora · The Name of the Wind · Tigana · A Little Hatred
Book One - The Harmonic Cycle series
Character Biographies
Laoch Colganta
A professional infiltrator who takes a job to retrieve a ledger and finds Seren’s name written in what he wasn’t supposed to read. He doesn’t get involved or so he’s told himself for fifteen years.
Seren Aderyn
An Archive auditor who found the pattern in the numbers and believed the institution would correct itself if she could prove it. She was right about the proof.
Sera Noll
Fourteen months of watching people disappear from her district, keeping a ledger nobody asked her to keep, waiting for someone to show up who was actually doing something about it.
Tavem Rell
He has been running the same tavern for thirty-one years and knows things about Caldrath that historians would pay for. He does not offer this information. He sets down the glass he is drying without a word.
Captain Marrow
The Ironwatch commander who has signed every cooperation order for eleven years and is beginning to understand that order and justice are not the same thing and beginning to understand this for longer than he will admit.
