The Hollow Cathedral

An empire ran on perfect time. Perfect time ran on something worse.

For sixty years, the great clock of Hollowmere kept perfect time. Trains ran, harbors opened, an empire set its calendar by the city’s bells, and no one asked what the bargain cost.

Six weeks ago, the clock stopped.

Now Hollowmere is dark and cold for the first time in living memory — and, for the first time in living memory, honest. The cathedral on the hill still stands. Its bells still ring. Its high order still claims authority over a congregation whose grief is real and whose faith was built on a foundation only a handful of men have ever been permitted to see.

Callum Vane has spent his life being told he was wrong about what he could hear. Fen has spent his life being pointed toward a destination nobody told him about. Against every institution that shaped them, they have found each other. Now they have to decide whether they can keep each other — openly, publicly, in the shadow of a Church that would prefer they didn’t.

In a quiet room in a quiet inn, a woman’s body breathes without her. A child waits for her to come back. A ship returns to the harbour with questions no one wants to answer. And in the cathedral at the top of the city, the Arch-Cogitant is preparing a ceremony that will make visible, for the first time, what the beautiful thing has always been doing.

The clock stopped. The cathedral is still standing.

That is the problem.

A sequel to “The Hollow Clock”