The Brass Tempest

Aurelia Fenn enters her late mentor's sealed workshop expecting to catalogue the remnants of his life. Instead, she discovers a hidden chamber containing thirty years of forbidden research, fragments of impossible machinery, and a brass sphere designed to awaken only in her hands. The device is called the Chrono-Lume. When Aurelia activates it, the sphere projects a map to fourteen locations that should not exist—lost cities, unknown realms, and destinations positioned not only across the world, but across time itself. Before she can understand why her mentor chose her, agents of the secretive Vangrim Directorate arrive to seize the machine. Aurelia escapes aboard the sky-sloop Brass Voyager with ingenious mechanic Caius Pelliwick and former soldier Evan Goodfellow. Soon the Chrono-Lume takes control of the vessel's course, drawing them into the Stormglass Reaches, where crystallized tempests shatter ordinary navigation and ships may emerge years after they entered—or never return at all. Their journey reveals that the Chrono-Lume is only one part of an ancient Voyager Engine built by the mysterious First Clockmakers to repair fractures in time. The Directorate has spent years gathering the remaining components under the command of Mara Vex, a woman convinced that history itself must be rewritten to prevent a greater catastrophe. To stop her, Aurelia and her growing crew must cross floating realms, ruined networks, frozen monasteries, and broken timelines in search of the Parallax Key. But every discovery raises a more dangerous question: did Aurelia's mentor leave her the means to save the world—or choose her to finish a machine that once nearly destroyed it?