Keepers and Takers

Fantasy about the dead: keepers, not necromancers

Most fantasy about the dead raises them, binds them or fights them. The Keeping does something else. Its dead are people, and every book asks the same question: who is going to carry them, and what will it cost?

Keepers

A keeper carries real dead on the body, by consent, and both of them stay themselves. The marks cannot lie: a name kept well stays dark, a name let slip goes grey, and a name finished leaves nothing at all, as the marks you wear explains. The ink and the salt only hold the place. The keeping itself is the saying: one true thing about the dead, remembered and spoken out loud, day after day. See the saying and the salt.

Takers

Takers feed on the memory of the dead, and every keeper looks to them like a full larder. Whoever they finish suffers the second death: forgotten, gone all the way out, and never coming back. The line between keeping and taking does not run between two camps. It runs through every person who carries the dead.

Who you carry

Who you carry changes how the carrying feels. Your own beloved dead are the hardest to hold, because love wants to grip, while a stranger's are the lightest. Old souls handed down through other keepers arrive with expectations, and the forgotten, who have gone longest without anyone saying their names, are the hungriest. More in the kinds of dead you carry.

Seven series, one world

The Borrowed Dead Antwerp · A Trilogy · Complete, all 3 out now A clearance man wakes one morning with a dead stranger's family on his skin, and the marks open onto other times. The Founding of the Aumbry The Bridge · A Novel of the Keeping · 9 November 2026 How the school was born. The founder carries his last dead and hands the craft on. The Aumbry Years The School Saga · 5 Books · From 9 December 2026 A school that teaches you to keep the dead without taking them over. Dark academia, told across five years, with one heir nobody thought to protect. The Nightcrosser Naples · A Trilogy · From 9 May 2027 A homicide detective with a quiet kind of magic, who crosses into the land of the dead to bring back the ones taken before their time. Occult noir, set in Naples. The Written Bones Prague · A Trilogy · From 9 August 2027 A Prague relic-keeper writes the dead into bone, and hunts the fallen of her own house, one bad night of grief from becoming what she hunts. Gothic occult thriller. The Gravesalt Road The Road · A Trilogy · From 9 November 2027 The far salt-flats. A wanderer so crowded with the dead he carries that he is barely a man keeps the souls no one else will, and his dog carries the one soul he could not bear to hold himself.

The Unconnected The Riviera · A Trilogy · In the works A supernatural thriller on the French Riviera where a grieving engineer hunts the keepers of the dead, and you always know, before he does, what his machines are setting loose.

In the Codex

Keepers A Keeper carries real dead in the marks on their skin, and lets them live alongside the living rather than consuming them. Takers 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 Kinds of Dead You Carry 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 Folk-Keepers and the Salt-Road 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.