Ledger of the Empty Maw

On the Black Sea Reliquary Flotilla, where storms redraw parish boundaries and confession receipts serve as currency, Veska Lorn-Kest processes orphans with mechanical precision. She assigns names, stamps tags, and sends children into labor pipelines without flinching, because she was once one of them.

Beneath her forged identity lies a death sentence: the Draev-Morin bloodline, purged for heresy before she was born.

For eighteen years, Veska has waged a quiet war with ink and paper, laundering lineages and "losing" children whose ancestry would burn them.

But when a message arrives bearing a name she hasn't heard since childhood, a name connected to the mother who died giving her life, Veska faces an impossible choice. To answer means traveling to a rain-swept coastal settlement where someone from her past waits with secrets that could destroy everything she's built, or prove that her entire crusade has been a lie.

As an ancient hunger stirs in the flotilla's depths, a corruption that makes the starving devour themselves, Veska must decide what she's willing to consume to survive, and what consuming has already cost her.