The Hollow Asylum

Every light in the city is a soul. He's the man who made it merciful.

Erasmus Cassin is not a monster. That is the problem.

He is a grieving widower and a brilliant engineer, and when he discovers the secret buried beneath Hollowmere — that the whole shining city runs on the bound souls of its own dead, ground to nothing in machines too crude to be called anything but cruel — he does not look away. He does what a decent man does. He decides to make it kind.

No more grinding. No more waste. No more terror. Under Cassin's design, the giving will be gentle, reverent, willing — the soul carried across the threshold like a leaf lifting from a branch. He will take the horror out of the cellar and into the light. He will build a cathedral where there was once a slaughterhouse.

He will be proud of it.

The Hollow Asylum is the origin of the Ravencrest Institute and the man who became its first eternal prisoner — a chilling, intimate prequel to the Hollow Clock Saga that answers the question readers have asked since the beginning: not how a city came to run on the dead, but how a good man chose it, one reasonable step at a time.

You will understand him. You will agree with him. And somewhere along the way, you'll realize you've followed him too far to turn back — just as he did.

Some doors are built to look like a welcome.