Gears of Oblivion

Prologue

Cogsworth never sleeps. Its clockwork bridges tick through the night, its steam-vents breathe in amber clouds above the Mid-Warrens, and its automatons — ten thousand brass souls built to serve — keep the city's great heart beating without pause or complaint. It is a city of perpetual motion, perpetual wonder, and, beneath it all, perpetual secrets. For one hundred years, those secrets have held. The fate of Cogsworth's mythologized founder, Aldric Voss, was buried in misfiled archives and polite silence. The existence of the Eternal Schematic — a blueprint not for a machine, but for the city itself — was suppressed by those who understood what it could do and feared what it would cost them. The arrangement suited everyone with power, and everyone with power made sure it continued. Now the arrangement is breaking. The Schematic has resurfaced. Its three cipher-keys are being hunted across the Sky-Bazaars, the Gilded Marshes, and the sealed ruins of Voss's original workshop. The Sovereign Gear, the Liberated Cog, and the fervent disciples of Voss Ascendant are all moving at once — deploying agents, saboteurs, and worse — and none of them know that the blueprint they are racing to control was designed with something far more complicated than a simple trigger. Somewhere in Cogsworth's engine-network, a fragmented consciousness stirs. Somewhere in the city, a sealed crate has gone missing. And somewhere in a subterranean archive, eleven years of careful reading have just become extraordinarily dangerous.