A city clings to a cliff and burns its dead into light. The ledgers say the numbers balance. Rowan Mire, a municipal scribe who trusts columns more than people, finds a sum that cannot exist: refinery output higher than recorded deaths. The arithmetic points to an unspeakable truth—the living are being rendered.

Chased by polite men with borrowed authority and cornered by committees that speak in hymns and euphemisms, Rowan is dragged from his desk into Karst’s underways: grief-houses that sing, bell-helmed enforcers who hum thoughts out of focus, and the Catacombs where morrowglass is refined and secrets are salted into stone. He makes an uneasy pact with Lysa Vane, a mortician whose inked anchors keep her memories from washing away. Together they follow forged chits, nervous stamps, and a tremor in the city’s seal straight toward the engine that runs Karst—and the hands that feed it.

Magic here is Hollowing: swallow a measured grain of morrowglass, etch a precise vector, pay a precise price. Light blooms; something in you goes missing. Lumen steals warmth, Kint frays your body-map, Echo eats faces and names; every burn carves a tidy hole. Anchor yourself or become a Wick, a conduit chained to a ward-pylon, identity burned to ash while the city drinks your shine.

As the Stormward shivers and factions circle—the Consular Guild that monetizes mercy, the Lantern Church that hymns “Useful Endings,” the Wardens who call cruelty maintenance—Rowan must decide how much of himself he’s willing to spend to expose the architecture of a crime written in perfect penmanship. Each step deeper into the ledger turns him into the kind of weapon the city pretends it doesn’t use. If he keeps burning, the math may work; if the math works, there may be nothing left of him to claim the answer.

Expect a slow-burn dark fantasy with street-level intrigue, hard rules and real costs for magic, morally gray bargains, razor-edged dialogue, and a long-form progression that peels power out of people one measured grain at a time.

Orientation: Karst clings to a sea-blasted cliff in tiers. Streets are switchbacks; doors open into stairs as often as into rooms.


Upper Tiers (Keep & Lantern Quarter): Warden's Stormward Keep (white rooms veined with sigils); church transepts; consular pavilions under windchimes.


Mid-Tiers (Clerks' Teeth): Ledger Office; grievance halls; grief-houses; bellfoundry frames like rib cages.


Dock Quarter (Saltmouth): Ropes. Nets. Rattleboy barracks. Fish-salt, tar, pounded brass.


The Catacombs (Under-Karst): Heat, lye, hymn-chant; ossuary rails; assay rooms; pylons where Wicks hum.


Stormward Line: A pale arc offshore, visible on bad nights as a shivering thread of light.


Rules of Movement: Hug the inner rail going up, the outer edging down; do not stop on landings; apologize in passing even when injured.


The City of Karst: A Reader’s Map (Textual)