The Salt-Mages of the Drowned Coast

About this book:

The sea doesn't just rise in Pel-Vael—it breathes. And right now, it's inhaling.

Gideon is a salt-mage: a specialist in the grim arithmetic of holding back the ocean, brick by crumbling brick, trading the mineral salts in his own blood to keep the city's bones from dissolving. His joints are calcified, his fingers numb, and the Spire of Saint Judith—the great counterweight anchoring the harbor chain—is rotting from the inside out. When the Bitter Shallows suddenly vanish, sucked dry into a vast, boiling trench three leagues out, Gideon realizes the sea hasn't retreated. It's making room for something older to rise. The High Silt Council's answer? Break the ancient wards sealing the deep sluices. Flood the foundations. Save the upper wards and let the poor drown in the mud.

But the water didn't leave because a gate was closed. It left because something in the dark unstoppered the world's drain—and if Gideon opens the Seventh Sluice now, he won't be letting the ocean back in. He'll be inviting the abyss to dinner.

Atmospheric, visceral, and built on a magic system that costs flesh and bone, *The Salt-Mages of the Drowned Coast* is a slow-burn disaster novel where the enemy isn't a villain, but the patient, hungry physics of a world that wants its drowned cities back. Perfect for readers who love the industrial grit of *The Aeronaut's Windlass*, the body-horror cost of magic in *The Book of the Ancestor*, and the sinking dread of *The Drowned Cities*.