Original AI-generated book

The Threadburner's Ledger

About this book

In the ash-choked caldera city of Kharos, fate is a visible thing. The Spun carry golden veins beneath their skin and rule from the Glass Senate. The Unspooled, threadless and invisible to fate, are worked to death in the obsidian mines below. Between them stand the thread-readers, the priestly caste who certify which bonds are fated and which are worthless. Seren Ossar is one of the finest readers of the Ninth Loom, trusted with the marriages of senators. She is also the city's most wanted criminal: the Threadburner, who forges gold into threadless skin, severs certified bonds for a price, and records every transaction in a ledger she should have destroyed years ago. Her own veins glitter with a lie she has told herself so often she almost believes it. When Prefect Kadran Vethral—the Senate's own hunter of threadburners—discovers that his golden veins are dimming, he needs a reader corrupt enough to hide it. What begins as mutual blackmail becomes something neither of them can certify: a bond no temple would ever approve, growing between a man losing his fate and a woman who stole hers. Then a woman comes up out of the mines with Seren's face, calling herself the Threadless Hand, and asks for her thread back. As riot, purge, and revelation tear through the caldera, Seren learns what the gold in her arms actually is, where it comes from, and what it costs the children who supply it. Her ledger can bring down the Glass Senate, incriminate everyone she loves, and expose the version of her past she has spent six years rewriting. A dark, mature romantasy about stolen fate, chosen love, and the price of an honest account.