From orphan to soldier to something else entirely, Rin’s journey is set amid the brutal backdrop of war, myth, and drug-fueled power. Nothing stays clean in this story—not victory, not magic, not the soul.
Robin Swift, plucked from Canton and sharpened in the halls of Oxford’s clandestine Babel Institute, discovers that the power of magical “silver-working”—born from translation—is bound to British imperial might. As he and a circle of misfit scholars confront the moral cost of their scholarship, they must weigh loyalty and resistance in a fragile rebellion where language itself becomes the ultimate weapon.
Alice Law, a driven magick scholar at Cambridge, unwittingly sends her revered advisor’s spirit to Hell—and in a desperate, Faustian bargain, sacrifices half her lifespan to retrieve him. Forced into an uneasy alliance with her academic rival, Peter Murdoch, she descends into a hellscape of logic-bending trials, where survival depends as much on cooperation as it does on cunning.
