On the night the bells of Glasshaven tolled for surrender, blood slicked the marble steps of the Heliodrome. In the ash-bright dawn of the Sable Uprising, relic-bearers—those who could wake sleeping divinities bound in copper and bone—fell from untouchable magistrates to branded fugitives. Lira Callow, last scion of a disgraced cupbearer line, learned to swallow her gifts and her grief. By day she catalogs broken miracles behind the barred doors of the Museum of Unmade Saints; by night she slips through the Salt Quarter decoding contraband palimpsests, chasing the rumor that the Lost Chalice of Lysael can mend what the revolution sundered and quiet the hunts forever.
When an unseasonal tremor splits the riverbed and exhales a stair of blue stone, Lira descends into a chamber that breathes. There, beneath a drift of saintglass and river silt, an inscription names her blood and demands a companion: the Chalice may only be awakened by two vows, freely given. Commander Dorian Vale, a war-worn lictor of the Purity Tribunal whose iron ring has shattered more relics than anyone living, arrives to seal the site and arrest its trespasser. But the White Famine—the ascetic cult gnawing at the edges of the new republic—springs its own trap, and a relic-geas fastens around Lira and Dorian both: retrieve the Chalice together, or let Glasshaven starve as the river withers to salt.
Bound by a vow neither asked to make, the unlikely pair cut a path through the floating markets of Kestrel Quay, the sunken ossuaries beneath Orlaith Cathedral, and the stormlit Bluefang Isles, each step unraveling the lies that keep the city obedient. Dorian, raised on doctrine, finds in Lira not a heretic but a scholar who tends broken things with a steadiness he has never learned. Lira, who has only ever trusted ink and silence, discovers a soldier whose faith is mostly scar tissue and whose careful listening feels like a harbor. Yet the Chalice is no benevolent myth; it promises apotheosis at a price, and demands that one vow be poured out so the other may rise. As the White Famine closes its noose and the Tribunal sharpens its knives, Lira and Dorian must choose what to unmake: the tyrannies that remade their world, the gods asleep within the metal of it, or the fragile bond that might be the only true miracle they have. In Glasshaven, the only thing more perilous than waking a god is loving someone powerful enough to undo you.
