The Undying Witness

Beneath Brisbane's ordinary surface — the river, the suburbs, the jacaranda-lined streets — runs a world that most people never see. Sorcerers. Bloodlines. A classification system that sorts human beings by the weight of their power and the threat of their nature. Monsters in the outback that the Hunter Union manages with quiet efficiency. Things in the ocean that the Hunter Union does not discuss. Dorian Laurent Errant knew none of this. Then a ring arrived on his kitchen table. Warm metal, worn cord, no note. Then a voice — ancient, precise, and considerably more opinionated than he was prepared for — told him his family name was not as dead as someone had worked very hard to make it appear. The Errant bloodline has been systematically dismantled for a thousand years by someone who has the patience of an institution and the precision of a surgeon. Dorian is the last of it. Fifteen years old, newly awakened, carrying a power that the sorcerer world's classification system cannot cleanly account for. His element is Soul. His divine technique accumulates something that cannot be named without understanding what it costs. His stigma ensures that significance finds him whether he wants it to or not. And somewhere in the world's institutional machinery, someone has just received a report with his name on it. The response is a single line. It is not pleased. The Undying Witness — a story about what we carry, and what carries us.