The Codex
The Codex of the Keeping
How the dead are kept, and how they are taken. The orders, the rules of the marks, the crafts and the other times, as the books reveal them. New entries open on each book's release day.
The Orders
Keepers
Those who carry the dead. A Keeper carries real dead in the marks on their skin, and lets them live alongside the living rather than consuming them.
Takers
Those who eat the dead. A Taker consumes the memory of the dead for power. To them a Keeping is a full larder, and a good Keeper is the richest one they will find.
The Vestibule
The neutral order at the city's edge. They neither keep nor take. They study the door, channel its energy, and sell passage through time and distance for a toll paid in self.
The Rules of the Marks
The Ways of Keeping
The Saying and the Salt
How a dead is kept. The salt and the mark only hold the place. The saying, the name remembered and spoken, is the keeping, and it is the bearer who does it.
The Kinds of Dead You Carry
Warm, cold, old, and forgotten. Keeping feels different depending on who you hold: warm for the dead you loved, cool for a stranger's, heavy for an old soul handed down, and hungriest of all for the forgotten.
The Marks You Wear
A ledger, not a cage. A keeper's skin records what they keep, and it cannot be argued with: dark for a name kept well, grey for one let fade, and nothing at all for one gone all the way out.
The Cost of the Door
Looking is loud. Traveling spends a name. To look through the marks costs nothing, but draws the hunt. To travel through them spends a name off the skin, and whether that name is delivered to safety or destroyed depends on why you spent it.
The Glass and the Bearer
The sight lives in you, not the ink. Any pair of glasses a keeper charges with their own body becomes a window into the other times. The sight can be shared, but only with someone standing near. Range is the bond.
The Folk-Keepers and the Salt-Road
How keeping outlived the keepers. There was never an institution. The craft passed hand to hand, along the old roads, among scattered people who marked their dead in their own quiet ways and knew each other on sight.
The Water That Keeps
Skin is not the only vessel. Before ever a mark was inked, the dead were kept at the water. Once a year their names are spoken at the river so they do not go all the way out, and the nameless are washed and spoken for by whoever will stand and say them.
The Hand-Key and the Flower
How a keeper looks, and how a keeper travels. Not all of a keeper's marks are dead. The oldest sit on the hands and hold no names. They are an engine, not a record. Spoken aloud, they open a flower of pale circles on the wall: a ring of hours you can look into, or step through.
The Toll-Mark
Passage you buy with a piece of yourself. A keeper travels on their own hand-marks and pays in the dead they carry. The Vestibule sells passage to anyone, but the fare is not coin. It is a measure of self: a memory, a sense, a year, a name.
The Other Times
The Drowned Valley
Through the glass: 1623, four centuries gone. A Flemish valley going under the water, with a church tower drowned and a family of dead who were not all let go cleanly.
The Second Death
To be eaten all the way out. The first death is the body. The second is being forgotten, eaten name by name until a person is gone for good. It is what the Takers do, and what the marks are meant to prevent.
The Library
Through the glass: 2456, where the road forward ends. Four hundred years past Bram's own time, a forgetting world keeps its dead on shelves: sorted and safe and not one of them loved.