He can link any two souls. But every connection costs him a piece of himself.
Three days after the sandstorm buried his village, Jakir woke in the sand as the only survivor. And something woke with him: a power that should have killed him. Instead it made him something far more dangerous. A bridge between minds, able to force connection where none should exist.
On Solterra, the Resonance links all of humanity through shared rhythm. The Choir is its opposite: beings who carved the power into their own flesh, hollowing themselves into vessels that consume others to fill a manufactured void. Now they are branding children, burning out their ability to connect, turning them into weapons against their own kind.
The Sanctum believes Jakir is the answer. He can bridge the branded back to humanity. He can restore what was stolen. But the children don’t want to be saved. They are begging to return to the Choir, choosing emptiness over the agony of reconnection.
Every bridge Jakir builds tears him apart from within. Every mind he touches leaves an echo inside him. His instructors push him toward a terrible arithmetic: save twenty children by bridging forty minds, even if it burns him hollow. What is one life against so many?
But math was never about souls.
As an ancient power stirs in the ruins, something neither connection nor hollow but far older, Jakir has to decide. Is he a bridge to salvation, or have they all been building toward something far worse?
For readers of N.K. Jemisin and Brandon Sanderson. Afrocentric fantasy where the magic lives in culture, the hero carries impossible weight, and the hardest choice is whether saving someone means becoming everything you fear.
