by The Fool Who Writes
Some doors don't creak when they open. They just quietly rewrite everything behind them. James Carter was nineteen, an orphan, and had built an entire life around being forgettable. Then a street that should not exist swallowed him whole for one night — and gave him back with a cold black button sewn into the lining of his coat, and something in the fog that had started to notice him back. He is not being hunted for what he knows. He is being hunted for what he is — an empty vessel, unclaimed, unmarked, and running out of time to change that. Eleven pathways wind upward through the dark toward power beyond mortal reckoning: seven cheap and merciless, four divine and forbidden to men like him, and one that isn't supposed to exist at all. The debt is already written. The only question left is what James is willing to become to pay it.
