The Weaver of Souls: A Gothic Dark Romantasy

Fate is not woven. Whoever tries does not write it: he shortens it.Damien Veyl restores tapestries for the great houses of the city. He is courteous, precise, and impossible to know. He is also two hundred and eleven years old, and behind a door at the end of the east corridor there is a room no servant may enter.What he does in that room he has done for two centuries. He asks a man what he wants. Then he weaves it, with a hair or a drop of blood worked into the warp - and the thing arrives, whole and beautiful, and afterward the price is paid by whoever received it. Thirty-five faces hang on those walls. He has never counted them.Elin Rovan is twenty-two and washes his stairs. She is a dyer's daughter with fifteen scars on her hands and a debt her father cannot carry alone, and she notices two things nobody has noticed in eleven years: that a gentleman has the thumb of a man who has pulled thread, and that he knows what woad is.She should be afraid of him. She isn't, and that frightens her more.Across the city, Inspector Aldric Renn is counting. Sixteen deaths in eleven years, none resembling another, every one of them explicable and none of them explained. He is not a clever man and knows it. He is only slow, and patient, and he does not stop.Between them stands a man who has spent two centuries making certain that no one ever gets close enough to see him age - and who has just discovered that he wants one person to. A slow-burn gothic romantasy of magic that always costs, love that arrives too late to save anyone, and a bargain no one walks away from whole. Standalone novel. No cliffhanger. Bittersweet ending.