The Hollow Covenant

The world of Urn is governed by power. This is not the transient power of kings, as Urn has learned to distinguish the temporary from the enduring. The true power is ancient: the Marrow-Absence, a void at the core of every living being where the world's wound manifests, and the four paths traversed by practitioners of the Hollow Covenant for three millennia. At each ascending rank, practitioners must determine how much of themselves they are willing to relinquish to become entities the world cannot disregard. On the fourteenth night of the Month of Closing, House Ashvane ceases to exist. House Ashvane is neither conquered, burned, nor destroyed by any visible army. Thirty-eight individuals, lords, soldiers, servants, and the visiting heir vanish before dawn, leaving behind a fortress of cold stone marked by an unidentifiable scent that eludes classification by investigators from all four major institutions. There are no bodies, no declarations, and no surviving witnesses except for a nineteen-year-old girl who, while away at school, learns of her family's fate and awakens to a practitioner ability she neither sought nor can yet control. Every power in Aldrath seeks to uncover what destroyed House Ashvane, not in pursuit of justice, but for the implications regarding what is possible and what may come next. Across the courts, cliff-cities, desert oases, and fog-shrouded valleys of a world shaped by the management of ancient horrors, nine individuals pursue nine threads toward a singular truth. Among them are an investigator whose father may be implicated, a soldier replaced by a ghost, a widow who reads the emotional residue of a friend's final hours, a young lord deciphering a dead man's notes about a voice that wears a god as a mask, and a girl who can suddenly sense the suffering of every object she touches. They will uncover the truth, which will prove more devastating than they feared. Beyond this truth, older than the Covenant, the kingdoms, or the first practitioner who confronted the world's wound, something is preparing to complete what it began. The throne has always been hollow, and only now does the world begin to comprehend its significance.