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 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. Bram, his one uncomplicated friendship, is why the first book hurts; Elke Vonk, the one person he tells the truth to, carries the love story. Moral horror without gore: closed doors, slow burn, an institution as antagonist, an ending that refuses absolution. Literary dark academia for readers of Babel and Never Let Me Go.
The Books
Book 1
The Ward
Twice a year they put him in a borrowed coat and stand him at a pillar: proof the old families and the new order can sit together. In the lower district, a man has not been right since the equinox.
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Book 2
The Mercy
He has counted the tin twice and got the same answer both times. Nine copied sheets prove nothing to anybody. Five households, seven questions each, and the one thing he needs to know is who came to the house.
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Book 3
The Correction
On Monday evenings the table is halved: Elke's printed returns on one side, and on his a hundred and forty households nobody else in the city has walked. Two names go in nowhere at all, and sit with him.
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Book 4
The Proximity
Four items on a half-sheet, and one of them is the thing. That is how the errands have come for four years. Then he sees that something has been walking through Elke's districts in order, a season behind her.
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Book 5
The Appetite
A dead club's collection book, bought for sixpence, three hundred names in a hand nobody will check. His collector's card is genuine. Nobody is ever glad to see the burial man, and nobody wonders what he is doing there.
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Book 6
The Kindness
The cart comes out of the yard at half past eleven, and the trick is not to be quiet. The trick is to be a cart. Aleid gets as far as the second corner before the cough starts.
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Book 7
The Persuasion
Eleven of them in a house behind the rope-walk, where the water comes up rather than down. Nineteen questions, asked eleven times, and they have never got him anything. Then a card comes for Vonk: Wednesday, eleven, not after.
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Book 8
The Keeping
Elke's book has been under a floor, inside a bolster, behind panelling. He sweeps out a borrowed room over a cooper's, gets two panes back in, and has a whole day in it before anybody comes.
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