Nariel: Veil of the Deep

He died once. He doesn't remember how. He doesn't remember his name. He woke up as an infant in a world that runs on magic he doesn't believe in yet, born poor, born close to a forest that everyone fears and nobody explains. His name is Gathor Nux now. That will have to be enough. Nariel is a world built on spell-craft and tradition — magic passed down through words, through academies, through bloodlines that have never once asked why the words work. Gathor asks why. He was a scientist before he was this, in a life he can only access in fragments, and the habit of looking for mechanisms beneath surfaces did not die with him. It turns out the mechanism behind Nariel's magic is more dangerous than anyone suspected. So is whatever is waking up beneath the forest. The monsters at the Deepwood's edge are getting stronger. The magic is getting less stable. The people who live closest to the treeline — people like Gathor's family — have learned not to ask questions about things that don't concern them. Gathor is constitutionally incapable of not asking questions. This is the story of a man who has already lost everything once, trying to understand a dying world before it takes everything again — and carrying the weight of that knowledge entirely alone, surrounded by people who trust him completely. He is not a hero. He is a scientist who is very, very afraid of dying twice. NARIEL: VEIL OF THE DEEP Some secrets sleep. Others watch.