Yves Edelweiss stopped aging the day his wife died.
He hasn't stopped paying for it since. Four hundred years of forbidden alchemy have cost him almost everything a person is made of—taste, color, fear, the simple ability to feel what he still, somehow, remembers loving. All that's left is the plan: bring her back, whatever it costs, whatever's left of him by the time it's paid.
The next step requires a sealed ruin only the Explorer's Guild can grant access to—and the Guild sends Cecile Brandt: sharp, capable, permanently unpacked, carrying a mentor's compass and a guilt of her own she's been outrunning for years.
Neither of them asked for this. But somewhere down this long, quiet road—through a world where railways are swallowing the last of the old magic, one town at a time—Yves will have to answer a question four centuries of ritual never let him ask: what is he actually trying to save?
