The City of Fire and Nightmares

Lara Veyth has spent her life mapping places the world has agreed to forget — three vanished settlements found, three pages added to a notebook that started the day her own memory ended. She was four years old when a fire took her family and left her with nothing: no faces, no names, no grief to hold onto. Only a gap shaped exactly like four missing years. Then a stranger says the name she has never spoken aloud to anyone: the City of Fire and Nightmares. A city beyond the Karsk Mountains that never finished burning. A city whose dead rise every night to live an evening that ended four hundred years ago. A city that does not wait for visitors — it waits for the ones it has already decided belong to it. Lara is one of them. She just doesn't know it yet. A dark fantasy about grief, memory, and the cost of refusing an ending.