• The Oracle of the Broken Pillar
    In the sun-scorched valleys of Ancient Greece, where the gods walked among men and fate was written in the stars, there stood the city of Orestia. Orestia was a city of pride, governed by a council of elders who believed that their wealth and power were signs of divine favor. Kastor was a youth of noble birth, but he possessed a spirit that was too large for the confines of the city's laws. He...
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  • The Idle Puppet Master
    Julian Thorne was the same as every other young aristocrat in Victorian London—at least, that is what the world believed. To the laziest of the lazy, he was a fixture of the gentlemen's clubs, a man who could spend an entire afternoon staring at a single piece of mahogany, his only ambition to find a more comfortable way to lounge. He was the "Idle Thorne," a disappointment to his lineage and a...
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  • The Glass Labyrinth of Brussels
    Fin-de-siècle Brussels was a city of lace and iron, a place where the bourgeoisie built opulent mansions to hide the decay of their souls. In the dim light of the salons, the air was thick with the scent of lilies and the heavy weight of unspoken desires. Adrien was a painter of shadows. He didn't capture the world as it appeared, but as it felt—a series of blurred edges, spectral figures, and...
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  • The Iron Chorus
    I The factory bell had not yet finished its dying shriek when the girl fell. Eleanor Ashworth stood at the gate of Thorne's Meat Processing Works on Whitechapel Road, her ledger clutched against her chest like a shield she did not possess. She had been inside for only twenty minutes, interviewing the foreman about the three children lost to the machinery in the past quarter. The foreman had...
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  • The Martyr of Reason
    The village of Saint-Sulpice was a place of deep shadows and deeper faith. In the year 1642, the only thing more feared than the plague was the Inquisition. Gabriel had arrived in the village three years prior, a wanderer with a small leather bag of books and a mind that refused to accept the world as a miracle. Gabriel did not claim to be a man of God, nor a man of science—for "science" was a...
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  • The Mirror of Many Faces
    I woke up in Paris on a Tuesday, which was wrong because I'd gone to sleep in London on Monday night, and I'd been in London for three weeks, and the man I'd been for those three weeks—the man who was Edward Blackwood, barrister, member of the Inner Temple, son of a retired army colonel and a French mother who'd died when I was twelve—had a meeting with a client at nine o'clock. But the man who...
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  • The Magnolia Offering
    I The swamp breathed. It breathed the way old things breathe when they are too heavy with memory to sleep and too tired to stay awake. Seraphina DuBois stood at the edge of the Beauregard plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, watching the cypress trees rise from the water like the ribs of something vast and ancient and half-drowned. The air was thick with the smell of magnolia blossoms and...
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  • The Soul-Suture
    (Act I: The Ascent) The island of St. Jude's was a jagged piece of rock in the Atlantic, home to a sanitarium that the world had forgotten. Dr. Thorne walked the corridors with a lantern, the light flickering against walls that seemed to breathe. He was a man of science, but his science was the study of the invisible. He believed that the soul was not a metaphysical entity, but a biological...
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  • The Corwin Files
    The rain had been falling on Los Angeles for eleven days straight when Jack Corwin got the phone call that would ruin his life. He was sitting in his office on Sunset Boulevard, a glass desk with a chair that had seen better decades, eating cold beans from a can and trying to ignore the leak in the ceiling that dripped into a coffee can with a rhythmic patience that matched his own. Jack was...
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  • The Gilded Cage of Bliss
    (Act I: The Ascent) The sanctuary was a masterpiece of white marble and soft, diffused light, where the air smelled of ozone and lilies. Patient 0 awoke to the same perfect Tuesday. The sun was at a precise forty-five-degree angle, the temperature was a constant seventy-two degrees, and the music was a gentle, looping harp melody. He remembered the transition—the coldness of the upload chair,...
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