The Hollow Clock

What they don't tell you is that you'll still be conscious. Every lamp in Hollowmere is burning someone's name. The city runs on soul-light. Sign the paper at the Hall of Records and your name lifts off you like sand through a fist. Your family gets a pension. Your sister gets an education. You get sixty years as a frequency in a copper pipe, keeping the streetlamps violet. The Church of the Mechanismus calls it transcendence. Lord Callum Vane calls it what it is. Two years locked in the Ravencrest Institute have left him one possession that matters: a stack of handwritten pages he calls the Record, filled with the names the city has agreed to forget. Cal can hear them. The Vane gift means the pipes have never sounded like metal to him. They sound like a choir. Then a man in a waxed canvas coat opens his door, says he was hired to steal a watch, and takes the witness instead. Fen has no use for martyrs. Cal has nothing but a list of the dead. Between them and whatever is buried under the Sovereign's Cradle stand a Church that has perfected the paperwork of erasure, the family that built the machine, and a clock that has not lost a second in sixty years. One of those things is going to stop. **The Hollow Clock** is Book One of the Hollow Clock Saga, a complete gothic gaslamp trilogy. Free to read in Kindle Unlimited. For readers of Freya Marske, C.L. Polk, and KJ Charles. - A city powered by bound souls, where the lamps are people - Slow-burn M/M romance between a locked-away aristocrat and the thief who took him - Dense, unhurried gothic atmosphere. This one takes its time before it runs. - Dark, and never hopeless. The saga ends with both of them still standing.