The Lost Soldier: Complete Collection: 1

The Great War did not just break men. It broke time. Elias Vance returned from the Ypres Salient with a wooden leg, a mind carved hollow by survivor guilt, and an impossible memory. For twenty years, while the world marched onward into a fragile peace, Elias remained stuck in the pulling, monstrous mud of 1914. Certain things stayed whether he wanted them to or not. The shelling. Gas. Blood in his mouth. Then there was the house. A grand French manor stood untouched in the middle of No Man's Land, where the clocks had stopped and the rooms smelled of lavender. A girl named Élise de Chastenet waited at one of its windows for a sun that never rose. For two decades, the asylums called him mad. They told him the house was a phantom born of shell shock. Then Élise begins appearing while he is awake, leaving damp fingerprints and mud on his jacket. Elias goes back to Flanders. He carries old trench logs with him. In villages half-forgotten by the maps, he starts asking questions. Mostly, he follows the one thing he has never been able to forget. The house was real. And what waited inside was worse than madness. The de Chastenet family has survived through an old bargain. Their beautiful home feeds on what war leaves behind, and somewhere inside it works a machine built from suffering: the Anguish Engine. Elias gets Élise out. That should have been the end of it. It isn't. Getting out only opens another door. Old forces begin moving again, and men who have spent years collecting the hidden remains of history start looking for them. Their road takes them through railway tunnels hidden from ordinary travelers, libraries left under water, and rooms the war somehow failed to destroy. Elias has already lost part of himself to the past. Now he has to decide how much more he is willing to give for Élise, and whether saving one person can tear open the years around them. Turn the page, but listen closely to the silence between the notes. The past is not dead. It is simply waiting in the mud for the rain to fall again.