In war-torn Petrograd, where reality is a weapon and the past can kill you, nobleman-inventor Sineus trusts only in logic. Cursed with the ability to see the chaotic memories clinging to every object, he uses his own inventions to erase them, creating a sanctuary of sterile order. But his control shatters when an occult bomb infects his sister, Lilya, with a fatal memory-plague that is slowly un-writing her from existence. His science is useless against it. The only hope is a mythical artifact: the Heart of the Artisan. To save Lilya, Sineus must abandon his workshop and journey into the Iron Palimpsest, a lawless, decaying district where revolutionaries see him as a class enemy. His only guide is Anja Kovac, a cynical smuggler with her own debts and secrets, forcing Sineus to risk his fortune on an alliance with no trust. Each step into this shadow world, where streets flicker with echoes of what they once were, pulls him further from the man he was. The mission becomes a desperate race. As Lilya's time runs out, Sineus discovers he is not the only one hunting the Heart. Captain Valerius Wolff, a ruthless agent of a German occult intelligence agency, wants the artifact to power a superweapon and has locked down the district to ensure he gets it. Trapped between Wolff's forces and the hostile revolutionaries, Sineus and Anja must navigate a battlefield of shifting loyalties and tangible ghosts. The mission catastrophically inverts when Wolff remotely activates the artifact, turning it from a cure into a bomb that will erase the entire district. With his hope of saving Lilya gone—a loss marked by her broken pocket watch—Sineus finally holds the overloading Heart. He must make an impossible choice: use its power for revenge, or attempt to neutralize it by absorbing its chaotic memories, an act of sacrifice that could cost him his sanity. To save the people who despise him, he must embrace the very chaos he spent his life trying to destroy. Will a man who built his life on erasure choose to become a guardian of memory, or will the ghosts of the past consume him first?
32 chapters
In war-torn Petrograd, where reality is a weapon and the past can kill you, nobleman-inventor Sineus trusts only in logic. Cursed with the ability to see the chaotic memories clinging to every object, he uses his own inventions to erase them, creating a sanctuary of sterile order. But his control shatters when an occult bomb infects his sister, Lilya, with a fatal memory-plague that is slowly un-writing her from existence. His science is useless against it. The only hope is a mythical artifact: the Heart of the Artisan. To save Lilya, Sineus must abandon his workshop and journey into the Iron Palimpsest, a lawless, decaying district where revolutionaries see him as a class enemy. His only guide is Anja Kovac, a cynical smuggler with her own debts and secrets, forcing Sineus to risk his fortune on an alliance with no trust. Each step into this shadow world, where streets flicker with echoes of what they once were, pulls him further from the man he was. The mission becomes a desperate race. As Lilya's time runs out, Sineus discovers he is not the only one hunting the Heart. Captain Valerius Wolff, a ruthless agent of a German occult intelligence agency, wants the artifact to power a superweapon and has locked down the district to ensure he gets it. Trapped between Wolff's forces and the hostile revolutionaries, Sineus and Anja must navigate a battlefield of shifting loyalties and tangible ghosts. The mission catastrophically inverts when Wolff remotely activates the artifact, turning it from a cure into a bomb that will erase the entire district. With his hope of saving Lilya gone—a loss marked by her broken pocket watch—Sineus finally holds the overloading Heart. He must make an impossible choice: use its power for revenge, or attempt to neutralize it by absorbing its chaotic memories, an act of sacrifice that could cost him his sanity. To save the people who despise him, he must embrace the very chaos he spent his life trying to destroy. Will a man who built his life on erasure choose to become a guardian of memory, or will the ghosts of the past consume him first?
World
