In the Ivory Citadel of Morne-Blanc, the city is built of bone. And the dead are dressed in gold.
Veda Sallow is a Relic-Dresser. In a city carved from the colossal, chalk-white ribs of an ancient leviathan, she survives by wiring together the skeletons of the "Saintly Dead" and adorning them with jewels for the aristocracy. To Veda, bones are just a canvas-until she touches one that pushes back.
Stellan Rauth is the Dust-Inquisitor. Masked in white leather and wielding a mace of meteoric iron, he is sworn to burn "False Saints" and hunt those who desecrate the city's sacred foundations. He is a man of ash and silence, feared by everyone in the Marrow-Pits, except the one woman whose hands are always covered in grave dust.
When Veda is commissioned to dress a mysterious skeleton found in the deepest mines, she discovers a terrifying secret: the bones are warm. She hasn't been given a corpse; she is hiding a "Sleeping Saint" with a heartbeat that echoes the city's own tremors. When Stellan arrives to inspect the relic, Veda is forced into a dangerous game of deception. But as the city begins to shake and the Inquisitor closes in, they realize that the ground beneath them isn't just rock-it's a god waking up.
A lush, macabre Dark Romantasy where love is found in the marrow, and the only truth is written in bone.