Ink and Oath

When the city's bells can steal your say-so, keeping your name becomes an act of rebellion. Marin Elari—called Left—is a twenty-something scribe with a troublesome gift: her copper-bright magic can teach things to pause. Doors wait. Ropes keep count. Even a bell might ask before it takes. In a hilltop city ruled by the Carillon—a tower whose hidden "lack" convinces crowds to obey—Marin's small craft is treason with good manners. Enter Oren Vale, a charming, knife-mouthed antihero slated for Unnaming: the state's neat way of erasing a person until even their body forgets how to answer. Saving him means doing the impossible—unhooking the city from the leash tucked inside its own music. With a widows' rope, a smith's modest bells, a carpenter's wedges, a clerk who believes in witnesses, and a grumpy river that keeps what you drop, Marin builds a revolution out of bread, breath, and better habits. But the Quorum's auditors have bred obedience into steel and song, and one of them—brilliant, relentless Vess—would rather leash the city than watch it learn to choose. As storms gather and the tower wakes hungry, Marin and Vale must cut the splinter from the Carillon's bone before the bells teach night itself to say yes.