The Keymaster Legacy

The summer isn't over. It has only moved.

Leo Vance survived the House and the Woods. What he has to show for it is a canvas bag of small, plain objects, a journal that tells him where to go next and never why, and a crew that has no business surviving anything: a porcelain doll with one eye, a moss-creature who panics out loud, and a brass owl who narrates each disaster while it is still happening.

The road ahead runs out to sea, where the water keeps what it takes. Up through the storms, where a thing made of white ink wants to file him under obsolete. Down into a foundry where fear is beaten into weapons and the ones too weak to forge are thrown away. And finally into a city so orderly that nothing inside it is permitted to be strange.

In a dead caldera, Leo finds a bead of black glass shaped like a tear.

Worn, it makes him calm. Efficient. Steady-handed, clear-headed, and untroubled by anything at all. It does not whisper, or tempt, or promise. It simply removes the part of him that lies awake doing arithmetic about a car crash, and leaves behind a boy who is very, very good at the job.

The terrible thing about the Obsidian Tear is not that it lies to him. It is that it works.

Every monster Leo meets makes him the same offer in a different costume. Put it down. Stop carrying it. Let someone else hold the weight, just for a while. They ask kindly. They make excellent points. Every refusal costs him something he does not get back, and every new offer sounds more reasonable than the last.

By the time he reaches the Great Mechanism at the bottom of the world, Leo will know exactly what the debt is. And who is going to pay it.

Volume Two of The Keymaster Legacy gathers Books Three through Six: the Sea, the Sky, the Foundry, and the Metropolis.