In the gleaming city of Aethel, built of glass and steel and powered by artificial suns woven from shared memories, light is currency and memory is power. The wealthy bask in the glow of curated
In the gleaming city of Aethel, built of glass and steel and powered by artificial suns woven from shared memories, light is currency and memory is power. The wealthy bask in the glow of curated joy, while the poor trade fragments of their lives for a flicker of warmth, their pasts dimming with each transaction. Leoda Marks, a young archivist in the Grand Archive, lives among the whispers of forgotten histories, revering the borrowed suns as the fragile threads of collective identity. But when she uncovers a meticulously erased segment of Aethel’s past, a chilling premonition shatters the city's shimmering façade.Driven by an insatiable curiosity, Leoda descends into Aethel’s shadowed underbelly, where memories are illicitly traded and stolen pasts cling to the air like a shroud. Here, she finds an unlikely ally in Silas Vance, a grizzled ex-memory broker haunted by the lives he’s traded. Together, they navigate a labyrinthine black market, uncovering a conspiracy that reaches the highest echelons of power. At its heart is Dr. Mallory Bellweather, a charismatic entrepreneur whose charm masks a chilling ambition: to reshape society by manipulating the very fabric of memory.As Leoda peels back the layers of Bellweather's deception, she becomes a target, hunted not just by his agents, but by the very system she seeks to protect. Her own memories become blurred, forcing her to confront the fragility of identity in a world where the past can be bought, sold, and rewritten. Meanwhile, in the opulent world above, Elias Thorne, a renowned memory architect, grapples with his own ethical dilemma, his wife's obsession with curated memories mirroring the city's manufactured reality. His path, and the path of Imogen, his wife, are destined to collide with Leoda’s, weaving a tapestry of intertwined destinies.With time running out, Leoda and Silas must race to expose Bellweather’s conspiracy before Aethel crumbles under the weight of its manufactured truths. In a breathtaking confrontation at the heart of the Grand Archive, they face a battle not just for the city’s future, but for the very essence of what it means to be human. For in Aethel, the light of borrowed suns has become a weapon, and the fight for memory is a fight for the soul.
