Rats in the Walls

The Doctor's Ledger

Lost Archives

The Hermit's Bell

The Chain That Binds

The Lighthouse Flame

The Map Beneath the City

Archivist Mora's original map of the sunken shrine was stolen by a cultist who was once her student, and it now lies in the Plague Vault among the prisoners. The map's margin carries a cure ritual in the shrine's own dead tongue, and Corin is one of the few people alive who can read it. He must recover the map, copy the ritual into his own spellbook before the ink runs or the page rots, and deliver the counter-words to the shrine before midnight.

The Unread Shelf

Before the quarantine, Corin catalogued a sealed ossuary shelf in the catacombs whose ledgers predate Nostramus itself. One ledger, the Grey Stair codex, contains a first-hand account of the last time the shrine woke, written by an archivist who went mad mid-sentence. Corin has avoided reading the final pages for two hundred years. Now the plague matches the codex's descriptions exactly, and he must finish what another scholar could not.

Ink and Ash

Corin's old mentor, Archivist Pellon Dray, catalogued the catacombs with him for forty years before choosing the Ratbound Choir's path. Dray is the cultist who stole Mora's map, and Corin knows his handwriting on the theft note. Corin must decide whether to redeem, expose, or destroy the only person who ever taught him anything, and Dray has left a message: a page of Corin's own early notes, annotated in Dray's hand, asking to meet in the Tallow Yard.

The Ledger of the Dead

Sister Neris has found a pattern in her ledger of plague victims: three dead on one street in a single night, none near the docks. Ysolde must help finish the ledger, walk the three houses in temple row, and follow the thread down into the crypt beneath her own temple, where Doctor Fesk kills the people he swore to save. The ledger is the only proof the city will accept, and Neris trusts no one else to carry it.

The Lantern That Must Not Go Out

The Temple of Mercy's doorway lantern has burned every night for thirty years, and Ysolde swore it would never go out. Now the temple's oil is gone, the tallow yard is a corpse staging ground, and refugees whisper that a dark lantern means the temple has closed and no one need knock again. Ysolde must find oil, wick and hands to keep the flame alive through the worst nights of the plague, while deciding how many dying strangers she can shelter before the doors cannot hold them all.

The Grave She Digs for Herself

Ysolde has buried three generations of parishioners, and she keeps a private list of graves she dug with her own hands. Among the names is her own: thirty years ago she arrived in Nostramus carrying a sickness she never named, and she has quietly dosed herself with temple remedies ever since, certain the weeping plague will one day finish what started in her lungs. Now her old cough has returned. She must find out what she has been carrying all these years, whether it is connected to the plague, and whether she has unknowingly been a carrier in temple row.

The Missing Manifest

Dockmaster Crane kept a copy of the Weeping Sister's manifest folded inside the hollow of his wooden leg, and the original was stolen by Mirelle Vantt. The copy names the ship's last port of call and the cargo it carried into Nostramus, and the Harbor Kin have already started burning the Ratwharf warehouses to hide what they moved. Tilda must get the copy out of Crane's office before the fire reaches it, decide whether to hand it to the Ash Watch or sell it to the highest bidder, and keep her family's tenement from going up with the rest of the district.

The Kin's Ledger

Tilda spent her childhood running cargo for the Harbor Kin, and she knows their book of debts and favors is hidden in the Rat's Rest tavern's cellar. With Mirelle Vantt serving the Ratbound Choir, that ledger now contains the names of every smuggler who unknowingly moved cult supplies into the city. Tilda must slip into the Rat's Rest while Mirelle's enforcers drink above, copy or steal the ledger, and decide whether to expose the names or protect the smugglers who once fed her family. The ledger also records a debt owed to Tilda's dead father, and collecting it could change everything.

A Door Out of the City

Tilda's driving goal is to get her family out of the quarantine alive, and she has spent weeks mapping every gap in the harbor wall without finding a route that works. Old Pell, the one-eyed ferryman, claims he once ran a night route through the Drowned Bell at low tide, before the chain went up and the water went wrong. Tilda must win Pell's trust, chart the drowned passage at low tide, and decide whether to use the route to smuggle her family out alone or share it with the desperate families of the fishmarket. The route passes close beneath the Weeping Sister's hull, where the rats are not the only things watching.

The Cloak He Gave Back

Captain Vey never filed Halvard's desertion; his folded ash-grey cloak is still in her quarters at the keep. She will only hand it back when he brings her proof that the plague is deliberate rather than divine. She also needs something she cannot ask for openly: her son is hidden in the temple row, sick, and the Inquisitor's spies are counting the sick. Halvard must walk the barricades of Nostramus, gather the evidence that clears his name, and decide whether a restored rank is worth more than a boy's life.

The Wall That Wasn't Held

The family Halvard saved at the north wall — a tanner, his wife, and two children — survived by hiding in the Salt Chapel in Ratwharf. But Corporal Munt, the guard who saw Halvard let them go, has been blackmailing him quietly for weeks, and now Munt wants more than coin: he wants Halvard to help the Harbor Kin move plague-tainted cargo past the barricades, or he names him a traitor to Inquisitor Quill. Halvard must confront the man who holds his secret, protect the family he saved, and decide how far he will let a bad soldier's greed dictate a good soldier's silence.

Nine Years of Ash

Halvard drilled beside Sergeant Holt for nine years, and Holt's sister is trapped behind a plague-marked door in the temple row, too sick to move and too afraid of the Watch to open for them. Halvard owes Holt a debt from the flood year — Holt carried a drowning child through waist-deep water while Halvard held the barricade — and now the debt comes due. Halvard must get the sister to the Temple of Mercy past Fesk's disguised collectors, who are quietly taking the sickest patients 'for treatment' and never bringing them back.