The Glass-Eyed Armistice
A Far-Future Siege Novel

About this book:

In the suffocating dark of a besieged city, two enemy soldiers fall through the roof of a taxidermy shop and into an armistice measured in sawdust, paraffin, and the unblinking stare of a thousand glass eyes. Corporal Ross of the Commonwealth and Ensign Vane of the Hegemony have no ammunition, no food, and no reason not to kill each other—except the freezing dark, the failing roof, and the strange, exacting work of preservation that might keep them both alive.

*T*he Glass-Eyed Armistice* transforms the cluttered workshop of M. Vane & Sons into a theater of survival where the skills of the preparator—armature-wiring, hide-stretching, the alchemy of salt and borax—become the only currency that matters. As the artillery pauses and the sleet turns to ash, a Commonwealth scout and an imperial naturalist negotiate a truce built on boiled rawhide, shared biscuits, and the quiet absurdity of sleeping beneath a mounted river-panther while the war grinds on outside.

Haunting, tactile, and darkly funny, this is siege fiction stripped to its skeleton: two men learning the anatomy of a ceasefire, stitch by stitch, in a shop where the dead have held their poses for decades—and the living are just passing through.