The Archive of Sartos

Fourteen months ago, Elarion Quellow was the only mourner at the funeral of the woman who raised him. Now a junior cataloguer at a shabby branch library in the drowned-delta city of Pellingwater, he is quietly counting the weeks until he can leave for a safe, prestigious post in the capital.

Then a book bearing her bookplate turns up on the Lacuna Shelf, where unrecorded returns go to be forgotten. He opens it and steps into Sartos: a city of scribes that folded itself into its own records four centuries ago rather than drown, and is now coming unbound.

Its imperious heir, Luna, needs a new warlock, someone willing to sign the Ledger and write amendments to the world itself, at the price of the world forgetting whose life they lived. Only two remain. One is dying. And the only pen that can enter a new name has been missing for twenty-two years.

With a storm tide rising over Pellingwater, how much of himself will Elarion pay to keep a city the world forgot?