Bone Dry

In Gearford, everybody is clay.

Rain keeps the city soft. When the rain fails, fingers crack, joints lock, and whole streets flake into dust. So every month the Iron Spire rings its bell, and the collectors come with wire. Debts are paid in living limbs. Every cut is stamped into a ledger beside a black iron chair. As long as the book is kept, the rain falls.

Elara Windwalker arrives from a salt-marsh town that already paid, carrying a blank-faced photograph, a short knife, and ciphers sewn into her coat. Under the Ropewalk she finds rebels, a mender, and a soft-voiced man in the chair who calls the city his children.

She came to tear the chair down. What she does not know is that the chair has been waiting for her. Winning is not the escape. And in a potters kiln, bone dry is the stage just before the fire: clay so finished that one more day without water, and nothing will ever bend again.

Bone Dry is a dark dystopian horror novel for adult readers.