The Bone Tithe Collector
A Dark Fantasy Novel

About this book:

In the empire of Ostracon, death isn't an end—it's a tax liability. Every skeleton belongs to the state, fueling the bone-built walls and tireless undead legions that hold back the darkness. Vaelen is a Collector-Investigator, a bureaucrat armed with a leadger and brass scales rather than a sword, auditing the dead with the cold precision of an accountant. But when the mining town of Blackbarrow delivers only twelve skeletons instead of eighty-four—and those twelve arrive moving on their own—Vaelen uncovers a discrepancy no ledger can explain: the dead aren't just missing. They're walking out of their graves.

What begins as a routine audit spirals into a conspiracy that reaches from the soot-choked mines to the highest seats of the Patriarch's power. Someone is stealing the empire's calcium backbone, assembling something vast and terrible in the deep dark, and they've framed Vaelen for the shortfall. With a paranoid driver, a hostile village elder, and skeletal horrors that shouldn't exist, Vaelen must balance the books before the final audit—because in Ostracon, the penalty for fraud is paid in bone.

*The Bone Tithe Collector* is a grimdark fantasy where bureaucracy meets necromancy, following a pencil-pushing protagonist who'd rather file a report than fight a monster—but will do both with equal meticulousness. For readers who love *The Locked Tomb*, *Johannes Cabal*, or *The Black Company*, this is a fresh, darkly witty tale of institutional rot, walking skeletons, and one very tired auditor who refuses to let the numbers lie.