To be forgotten is to be unmade. To be remembered is to be saved — at a price.
In the river-city of Aldwick, the truly forgotten do not die. When the last living person who holds you in mind finally lets go, you thin, you fade, and you rise again beyond the walls as a monster.
Wren hunts those monsters. She is one of the best of the grey-cloaked Wardens, gifted with a memory that never loses a face — which is exactly why the city lifted her out of a foundling house as a child and put a blade in her hand. A girl who forgets nothing makes a fine killer and a poor asker of questions.
Then she learns the truth her city is built on. The monsters are people. The poor, the friendless, the quietly struck from the rolls — fed to the dark one erased name at a time. And she has helped.
There is a cure. To remember a forgotten soul, truly and deliberately, can bring them back whole — but it costs the one who remembers a piece of her own mind, given away for good. When Wren discovers that her own sister was erased from her the very season she was made a Warden, and still wanders the deepest Wood, she will pay any price to bring her home.
Even if the price is every memory she has of the sister she saves.
A haunting, lyrical standalone fantasy about who a society chooses to forget, the people who refuse to let them go, and what it truly costs to keep someone.
