He can feel how open a person is. He thinks it means he can sense power. It means he can sense victims. Twenty years after the printing press broke the aristocracy's monopoly on magic, Corin Vael — a declining house's discarded bastard, planted at the monitors' Academy — is secretly the one thing the world exterminated to survive. He does not know it. All he wants is to be ordinary.
Across eight books he becomes the monster his family named him, one defensible choice at a time, while Elke Vonk, the one person he tells the truth to, carries the love story to its terrible price. Moral horror without gore: closed doors, slow burn, an institution for an antagonist, and an ending that refuses absolution — watched, not safe. Literary dark academia for readers of Babel and Never Let Me Go.
The Books
Book 1
The Ward
A sealed door in the dead academy opens for his blood, unbidden. Then his family asks, warmly, who impresses him up there, and he answers honestly, and names his only friend.
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Book 2
The Mercy
Stripped of the monitor's pin, he takes carrying work in the quay parish, where emptied minds surprise nobody. Then a dying woman starts to fray in front of him, and he reaches in to lift the cost.
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Book 3
The Correction
The monitors are compiling a street-by-street inventory of who in the city could be emptied — and it is hunting exactly what he is. He clerks for it, ruins his pages neatly, and learns what a week costs.
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Book 4
The Proximity
Years of perfect concealment, and he is right about every danger closing on Elke. Then an instrument is switched on in a crowded hall, and its light does not read records. It reads the room.
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Book 5
The Appetite
Done hiding, hunted out of his own name, he discovers a gift for getting people out of rooms they should never have been put in. The first time, he could not walk away. The second time, he goes looking.
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Book 6
The Kindness
Five hunted people, six rooms in four months, and no seventh anywhere. When decent men offer a lawful roof, he takes it — and safety finally asks for the one thing his family made an empire of.
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Book 7
The Persuasion
A binding cannot be undone, only moved, and only a binder can carry it. To free the woman he loves, he must take it onto himself — and first she has to agree. He never lies to her. Not once.
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Book 8
The Keeping
The binders are out of the shadows and the city knows what they were. The people he saved gather in one cold room, and will not speak in front of him. Then the woman he bound stands up.
Coming soon