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The marks and the door

Time travel fantasy where every trip costs a name

In the Keeping, the way into other times is written on the body. Bram, the hero of The Borrowed Dead, wakes with a stranger's family tattooed across his skin, and the marks turn out to be a working key to other times.

How the door opens

The oldest marks sit on a keeper's hands and hold no names. Say them out loud and a ring of pale circles opens on the wall, each circle an hour in another time. Through any pair of glasses the keeper has charged with their own body, you can look into it. More in the hand-key and the flower and the glass and the bearer.

What it costs

Looking is free, but the wrong people notice every look. Travelling has a price. Each time a keeper steps through a circle, one of the dead they carry goes off their skin. A name used to carry the dead toward safety moves on. Use one to escape, or to gain, and it burns for good. The rules are in the three rules of the marks and the cost of the door.

There is a second door, for anyone who can pay. The Vestibule sells passage through it, and you pay the fare in pieces of yourself, a memory, say, or a year of your life.

Where the road goes

Three times run through The Borrowed Dead. Antwerp, now, where Bram clears the flats of the dead. The drowned valley of 1623, a Flemish valley going under the water. And the Library, at the far end of the road, in 2456. The timeline runs from 1623 to 2456.

Book by book

In The Names I Woke With, Bram learns that the marks are a door, and what the first jump costs. The Greying sends him back into the drowned valley in the days the water came, to bring a fading name back to dark. By The Freed the road runs forward, up into a year past counting, and each step up it is paid for in names.

The Founding of the Aumbry follows the founder of the school across the centuries as he gathers his first teachers, and each crossing takes a piece of him.

In the Codex

The Three Rules of the Marks The whole reader-facing magic, cut to three lines: looking is free but loud, traveling costs a name off your skin, and nobody may take over a body. The Cost of the Door 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 Hand-Key and the Flower 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 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.

Places

The Drowned Valley A Flemish valley going under, four hundred years gone. A church tower stands drowned, and not all of the dead were let go cleanly. The Library Four hundred years past Bram's own time, at the top of the road, a forgetting world keeps its dead on shelves: sorted and safe and not one of them loved.