Beneath the Gilded Cage

The Aurelion Sanctum trains soldiers, mages, alchemists, and shamans to serve the Imperium. When something ancient and furious seizes Megan's squadmate Asha during a training exercise it does not whisper. It carves a burning sigil into the arena stone and announces, in a voice that belongs to a nonliving person. The Sanctum cannot explain what happened. So it decides to do what powerful institutions always do, and it sentences the witnesses to die. Megan is a paladin, where power lives in her bones that is carried through the Tithe of Bone. A magic that borrows its strength by fracturing her from the inside. Tiffany burns, Yara calculates, and Asha listens to things the rest of the world has forgotten how to hear. Four women that are fugitives by sundown. Hunted across a mountain range cracking open beneath their boots. What waits beneath the Imperium's roads is older than its laws. The Thaleri build a system beneath the continent. A vast network of anchor chambers designed to contain forces the earth itself cannot hold. The Chain is rusting, breaking, and the Imperium that once buried its existence rather than maintaining it is racing to destroy the proof before anyone alive understands what fails along with it. The magic is in the bones. The secret is in the ground. The empire wants to silence them. The Chain is rusting away.