THE BOOK THAT SHOULD NOT BE READ

Idris dies with his city’s curse in his ears and the Codex Noctis bleeding open in his hands. Then the dice roll again. He wakes twenty years earlier in The Bitter Ink, a tavern thick with cheap wine, bad debts, young scribes, and friends who should already be dead. At first, it seems like a second chance. But Cassian soon realizes the past has not been restored cleanly. Someone was waiting for him. Someone has already moved the first stones. In Veloria, names are not harmless. The name written in the records can hang a man, erase a child, or crown a thief. But beneath every given name lies a true name—guarded, costly, and dangerous enough to wake old powers from under the city. As Idris follows a trail of black leather, broken seals, living witnesses, and dead men’s ledgers, he uncovers a conspiracy older than the Curia itself: the Order of the Silver Bird, whose mark is a bird above a closed eye. To survive, Cassian must learn what was stolen from him before he was old enough to speak. And why the name everyone curses may never have been his at all.