Tier-1 Mender. Stuck three years and seventeen days on splints and sutures. About to find the artifact her grandmother forged on the eve of a suppression order — and her sister's handwriting telling her not to use it.
Tessa Vrenn is a Mender — the dismissed fourth class the Cleric Council insists is a flukish low-tier fusion of Cleric and Smith. The Council was wrong. Mender-forged implements absorb the wounds they touch. Old needles hold a thousand stories. New needles are mute. The progression currency is carried suffering, and the Council vaults are full of it.
When Tessa lifts a black-iron chirurgeon's needle out of a relic crate marked INERT — pre-Council, the iron salts in her workshop tray stand up on their edges and point at her hand.
By midday she has saved a soldier the senior Cleric had already given up on. By the end of the week she has crossed a door that should not exist into a frontier theocracy where her class is sacred, where a woman has been sleeping in a temple for eighty years, and where a Tier-7 Mender has been waiting on a chalk-pebble path for fifty autumns to tell her what her grandmother was.
By the end of the book she has stood public trial in a Council chamber. Bare-handed. In front of fifty witnesses. Death-Catching the cardiac event of the judge presiding over her own trial — the same judge whose family her grandmother was branded for.
Then a temple bell rings the wrong pattern across the Veil, and the woman who has been sleeping for eighty years is two heartbeats from dying.
This book was developed with the assistance of generative AI.
Genre: Fantasy
Tessa Vrenn is a Mender — the dismissed fourth class the Cleric Council insists is a flukish low-tier fusion of Cleric and Smith. The Council was wrong. Mender-forged implements absorb the wounds they touch. Old needles hold a thousand stories. New needles are mute. The progression currency is carried suffering, and the Council vaults are full of it.
When Tessa lifts a black-iron chirurgeon's needle out of a relic crate marked INERT — pre-Council, the iron salts in her workshop tray stand up on their edges and point at her hand.
By midday she has saved a soldier the senior Cleric had already given up on. By the end of the week she has crossed a door that should not exist into a frontier theocracy where her class is sacred, where a woman has been sleeping in a temple for eighty years, and where a Tier-7 Mender has been waiting on a chalk-pebble path for fifty autumns to tell her what her grandmother was.
By the end of the book she has stood public trial in a Council chamber. Bare-handed. In front of fifty witnesses. Death-Catching the cardiac event of the judge presiding over her own trial — the same judge whose family her grandmother was branded for.
Then a temple bell rings the wrong pattern across the Veil, and the woman who has been sleeping for eighty years is two heartbeats from dying.
This book was developed with the assistance of generative AI.
Genre: Fantasy
Used availability for Dominic Hale's The Mender Smith